Language Could Kill Us

Karl Tierney had just gotten a cat, according to his friend and occasional collaborator David Lamble. It seemed a hopeful sign. But Tierney wasn’t answering the phone. No one, in fact, had seen him since mid-October, at a metro station in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, not far from where he lived. “He left everything in the apartment: credit cards, checks, and a round-trip ticket to New York,” Lamble told the Bay Area Reporter. There was also, he said, a note.

The 39-year-old Tierney had been depressed for months. He was HIV-positive and actively symptomatic since the previous December, though he’d never spoken of it openly. By the time he vanished, Lamble said, “he was down to fewer than 50 T cells.” He’d stopped writing poetry. He rarely spoke to friends or family.

This was in 1995. By then, thousands of men in San Francisco knew their cell counts, which medications to take as prophylaxis and which to take as treatment, and “words like lesion, bile, pneumocystis,” which, as Tierney wrote in “After His Death,” “have battled and won over your tongue.” Jim Cory, a poet and another of Tierney’s friends, remembers sitting with a newspaper at Cafe Flore, a popular gay hangout in San Francisco, and flipping through page after page of “pictures of men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s next to small blocks of text in inky type.” Death and its reminders were everywhere. Out for a walk one morning in the late 1980s, Cory encountered “piled on the sidewalk at Castro and 18th, a wall of cages. Cats and dogs stare[d], each wet nose at the wire available for adoption.” Presumably, Tierney’s cat ended up on a similar curb.

Shortly before his disappearance, Tierney asked Cory to be his executor. Now, 24 years later, Cory has edited Have You Seen This Man? The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019), which collects, for the first time, a major selection of Tierney’s work. As a poet, Tierney is difficult to situate or describe. From the “perfect ass” to Pasolini, from Madonna’s relationship with Sean Penn to “20th Century American paintings,” his interests include a rich expanse of subjects. Sometimes, these contradictions appear in the poems themselves. “I believe taste a child of environment,” he writes in “A Social Creature”:

Most haven’t enough of either, which I call poverty
over my therapist’s virulent objections.
Judgmental again! Be tolerant, open to anything
and never discriminating. That egalite-liberte vein
called modernism that pushed libraries.

“Karl was never a ‘fan’ of anyone or anything,” Cory told me. “He read a lot of poetry, and I think he was essentially looking to get what he could use from other writing.” In Cory’s view, Tierney has two literary ancestors: Frank O’Hara and Catullus. Both wrote from spaces of social and institutional privilege; both found a universal human beauty in being devastatingly horny. From O’Hara, Tierney inherited a stance “which combines artistic and historical erudition with street smarts to chronicle the everyday,” Cory writes. In Catullus, Tierney saw an analogy between “Rome in its late period decadence and America in the immediate post-Vietnam period, a place of debt-driven consumerism wanting in all taste.” Like these forbears, Tierney also wrote about looking, about men with “little meat upon them // except between the legs”; like them, he had no tolerance for clique or cliché, for thoughtlessness, for “futile circles of buying and selling.” His poems are more frustrated than bitter, more self-mocking than self-pitying. They are beacons that flash “I am lonely”—not notes of despair.

Tierney’s cynicism was sharp enough to see how consumerism reduced gay men. The speaker in “Clone Nouveau,” for example, describes “one person simultaneously as two” and observes

            one to my left                                                     one to my right
              cloned from the horn-rim glasses             to the Italian shoes  
              even with my Panavision and quick thinking
              this is almost too much to gauge
              I mean the very shock of it
                           all the 70s clone types dead
              and this
                           in the midst of my mourning
              something utterly new in fashion
              if not philosophy         and the difficulty
              of so much to register utterly all at once

Yet Tierney was also compassionate as he watched the men around him participate in their own diminishment, buying their way into misery, isolation, and sickness. “When you’re dying of thirst, you’ll drink from a mud hole,” he writes in “Adam.”

Although these poems were written in another century, their theme—frustration with how easily, how stupidly, we destroy ourselves and each other and yet how the only way to meet that destruction is with tenderness, with delight, with a catty joke—makes Have You Seen This Man? feel wholly contemporary. We, queer or not, are still our own torturers and caretakers.

***

Tierney was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana, an Eagle Scout and an aspiring poet. He studied English at Emory University and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas. In 1983, he moved to San Francisco. There, he concentrated on poetry and on falling in love with men. Though he never published a book during his lifetime, he was not unread. More than 50 of his poems appeared in magazines and anthologies, including the American Poetry Review. He was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and a two-time finalist for the Walt Whitman Award. He spent time at Yaddo. All of which is to say this: Unlike many of his queer contemporaries, Tierney was accepted into the heterocentric institution of mainstream American poetry. He was not—like Dennis Cooper, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Steve Abbott—a recipient of Tom Clark and Ed Dorn’s “AIDS Awards for Poetry,” a hateful joke bestowed “in recognition for the current EPIDEMIC OF IDIOCY on the poetry scene,” as described in Rolling Stock, Dorn’s self-published magazine. According to Alysia Abbott (Steve Abbott’s daughter), Clark and Dorn printed “a large illustration of a test tube of reddish liquid, presumably infected blood, which was the ‘prize.’”

Still, Tierney was aware of his marginalization—and of the disposability of his life. “I entertain by reciting all the social diseases in Latin / before escaping into taxis committing us from club to club and / the blurry hazards of falling in love surrounded by mirrors,” he wrote in “Like the Clap or Some Chronic Disease.” But, reflecting on this “kind of pogrom, a healthy little social purge,” he adds, “In reality, the language could kill us.” Even though he considered himself (or the self in his poems) someone “who prefers keeping a distance of at least / one mile from that notorious street,” his compassion for the men in the Castro—“a neighborhood whose men are mostly dead or about to be”—is boundless, however complicated by rejection, frustration, and alienation. So, too, is his anger and resentment—as in “Boundary”—toward those who did nothing to intervene in the AIDS crisis:

There’s no law against the law when distrust is ultimate power.
[…]
The Church has handed over its realm;
no one of us knows if this was unwilling or a deal was struck.
We are not involved except as servants,
although, of course, our betrayal remains.

Despite his resistance to “clone culture” and to the Castro’s conformity, Tierney was active in neighborhood politics. He edited Gayvote, the newsletter of the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club. He supported progressive candidates, locally and in Sacramento, and wrote letters to newspapers criticizing their coverage of queer politics—or lack thereof. “Perhaps,” he wrote to the Bay Area Reporter in 1987, “if [the Harvey Milk Club] held our meetings at the Endup [an after-hours club] and had our ‘pretty boy’ leadership come in jockstraps you might have reported on some of the other important actions the Club has taken in the past few years.”

As with his poems and his love life, Tierney’s approach to politics was at once active, warm, perceptive, and hilariously cynical. He saw how the queeny drama of local political theater was intricately intertwined with desire, with AIDS, with the explosion of hate crimes in the 1980s, and with the cliques of the Castro. His poetry is full of knots where shame, rage, resentment, lust, fear, revulsion, and sorrow are all tied together, as in “After His Death”:

From a gingerbread Victorian, you watch
fog cancel the San Francisco Dream,
think of the one hundred bowls of gruel
you spoon fed him with “Eat!,”
think of his books decaying in the basement
shipped from Madison or Ann Arbor,
think of lovers in this city
who retreat down slim alleys marked
NOT A THROUGH STREET,
ending it with a hoarse whisper and leaving two cats.
[…]
 
Tonight you put on your best leather,
go out in a mantle of masculinity.
You only know old habits.
Who can say they’re bad ones?

In these poems, there are pretty young men who’ve been taught to reject themselves until they, too, are alone, like the eponymous “Adonis at the Swimming Pool,” who “minds not my advantageous looks, / my devious plots and debonair waves, / but weighs them for their worth in flattery.” In another poem, there are ex-lovers who “look steel-cold as yuppies / or rattle a little like machines still loose.” At “Club Uranus,” there are men who “purr like cats with tongues withdrawn / having waxed their winter fur / by the fire by couple but still / dogs, stupid and vacant-eyed”—and this, the poet says, “they call the look of love.” There is also the speaker himself, who, in “Postcards from Abroad,” “cannot begin to pronounce the names / of Persian port cities much less get laid / without having my billfold gone through.” We are not good enough for each other, these poems suggest, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate each other, even love each other, if for just a few minutes in some dark bar’s back room:

Maybe I’m looking for an aberration, a freak of nature,
staying up till 4 for a good song.
Not enough imagination in forming our lives
implies we wallow in history, of which we’re also ignorant.
Oh, take me home. You’re dumb and homely but still warm,
unique in every way.

***

When I first visited San Francisco in 1996, I’d just turned 12. Beyond Alcatraz, Pier 39, and Lombard Street—all the Mrs. Doubtfire spots my Midwestern family could see “in real life”—there isn’t much from that trip I remember. By then, the city’s AIDS deaths had surpassed 15,000, the highest per capita in the nation. That same year, the New York Times reported on the “first evidence of the effectiveness of protease inhibitors in [HIV/AIDS] patients.” Jules Levin, an activist who worked as a liaison between pharmaceutical companies and those dying of AIDS, called it “the Lazarus effect.” Today, these drugs keep more than 13 million people alive, including many people I love.

When I first saw San Francisco, nothing there indicated that thousands of people had just died of AIDS. Their suffering was invisible. In How to Survive a Plague (2016)—a history of AIDS activism, pharmaceutical research, and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)—David France recalls the hollowly triumphant moment when protease inhibitors worked their magic: “[T]here was never a celebration, no parade in the streets. As 1996 receded into the past, the media went silent again, as did many of the survivors, who found themselves staggering into an unfamiliar land, exhausted, disoriented, and lost.” Many had been fired from their jobs or kicked out of their apartments. Many had spent their savings on printing posters, on tickets to Washington, on expensive experimental medications. They hadn’t expected to survive.

During those years, as the writer and activist Sarah Schulman recalls in The Gentrification of the Mind (2012), “It was normal to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were being thrown out on the street. I remember once seeing the cartons of a lifetime collection of playbills in a dumpster in front of a tenement, and I knew that it meant another gay man had died of AIDS, his belongings dumped in the gutter.” For landlords and real estate developers, AIDS was an unexpected path toward gentrification. The virus swept the queers, the drug users, and the poor out in body bags and ambulances—or simply banished them to homeless shelters.

As one might expect, resentment seethes in Tierney’s poetry. In “Boundary,” he imagines the myriad heterosexual families whose ignorance and indifference helped send hundreds of thousands of people (today, approximately 40 million worldwide) to their deaths:

Visualize self-autonomies throughout the suburbs,
flower beds encircling rocks. Never mind qualms over
engagement with delusion, if it feels good, yes
have the Qualms over for tea or a barbecue.
Jim and Alice. Bob and Suzie.
The spirit is too grand for petty bourgeois melodramas!
You won’t have to think yourself a victim of talentless pretty-
boy actors who become Presidents after losing their looks.

And why shouldn’t there be resentment? AIDS and its traumas were then (as now) erased from public consciousness and shoved, along with queer people themselves, into a closet: How not to get angry?—to feel hurt? As Tierney wrote in “Vanity”: “Resentment is the Potting Soil of Scars.” But scars are reminders. “Nobody left those years uncorrupted by what they’d witnessed,” France wrote, “not only the mass deaths … but also the foul truths that a microscopic virus had revealed about American culture: politicians who welcomed the plague as proof of God’s will, doctors who refused the victims medical care, clergymen and often even parents themselves who withheld all but a shiver of grief. Such betrayal would be impossible to forget in the subsequent years.”

Frankly, it should be impossible. Tierney’s poetry is alive with this resentment and remembrance. Yet, even amid all that death, Tierney was catty: “A good Christian takes to all of humanity / as brethren, then changes the sheets.” He was tender: “You cost twenty bucks and lie and cheat / and have the most darling feet.” He was painfully self-aware:

Like a tree,
I’ve grown thirty-five rings around me,
a willow in a droopy state, my best young oak
with a poker face, a cedar now improving its posture,
the real bully bathing in purity, underneath.
These seeds we cultivate, these we feed the starving.

Have You Seen This Man? is staunchly against the possibility of forgetting: not only what happened and who died and how it felt but also how some of those in power who withheld care and compassion are still revered (I recently heard a Democratic presidential candidate quote Reagan approvingly). But Tierney also reminds us that, despite mass death and suffering, despite terminal diagnoses and an entire queer way of life changing forever, life continued. Even then, he writes, when “[t]he streets clog with the usual Leftist litter, / sidewalks with shorts, sunglasses, the smell of pomade, / sewers with the beady-eyed scurry of plague,” there is still the realization that “what’s left is most attractive to me, / which means I’m horny, which is most dangerous / these days, in this era of No One’s Choosing.” Tierney’s poetry offers a language of everyday resistance, of continuing to be oneself despite even the most apocalyptic forces. All of us are alive, after all—even the sickest and most threatened—until we aren’t.

***

It wasn’t until the last page that I realized Have You Seen This Man? takes its title from a flier Tierney’s mother pasted all over San Francisco after his disappearance. That his poems and papers survived an era in which so many similar treasures did not—when the families of estranged sons, brothers, uncles, and fathers threw a lifetime (however brief) of journals, photographs, artwork, trinkets, letters, and mementoes onto curbs or into dumpsters—is one of fate’s fortunes. That Tierney’s bicycle was found abandoned on the Golden Gate Bridge, in October of 1995, is one of its great cruelties. He’d just been rejected from participating in a medical trial that might have saved his life, and he’d fallen into a deep depression. When his family finally entered his apartment, Cory writes, “Among the messages recorded on his answering machine was one from his doctor, saying a mistake had been made in evaluating his application and that he was, in fact, eligible to participate in the protease inhibitor trial.” He never heard it.

Tierney’s rage is important. His cynicism is important. That he wrote poetry in the Castro from 1983 to 1995—the deadliest years of AIDS in America—is important. But anger alone isn’t what makes Tierney relevant today nor what makes his poetry so alive. Even as he was dying, he felt joy enough to celebrate a “lust with so many / beautiful young lollipops and white-meat thighs,” or “[t]he peculiar human development of the brain, waking up / and finding ourselves organisms in rooms of fancy— / sober museum pieces, fossilized at tea saying never thought / he’d seroconvert, survivors / still breathing like a few Victorians.”

Tierney “liked black,” Cory told me, “and wore a lot of black. His hair was black and I think he dyed it, not to cover gray, because there wasn’t any, but wholly for effect, for image. Sort of a Punk thing.” Among his many other enthusiasms, Lamble added, were classic cars, Elvis, personalized license plates, and the Congressional Quarterly, a journal providing stats and information about current members of Congress. He knew who was trying, politically, to kill him and men like him. As should we all.