Gay Sunshine

I’m lying on a bed in Boulder but I just spent a week in San Francisco. The engines of pride are beginning to turn there and all over the world and a particular genius friend of mine, the novelist and memoirist and poet and bon vivant I think Michelle Tea has been organizing fashion shows in San Francisco, benefits for summer writing retreats and finally two nights in June called Into the Streets in which a bunch of poets and writers all burrowed into the LGBT archive and found an artifact there, a poster, a pair of boots, a photograph and wrote something about each relic – just kind of enacted the item in any way possible. Now the time had come. Would the magicians actually pull the rabbits out of their hats or was this just another (thank god) gig.  In March, the month women get I wasn’t asked to do so much this year, so I’m thinking hmm not particularly “a woman”, Eileen, and in April the month poets get things were also slow so I can only conclude I’m functioning more as a queer poet more than anything else – this year – cause June is already busy which reminds me:  I wonder if the AWP approved the Queer Like Me panel I proposed – but this is not what I wanted to talk about though. Well two things. I decided to be a male homosexual poet in the piece I wrote and my poet guy was inspired by a certain John Wieners poem called Poem for the Old Man I found in a journal that spanned 1970 to 1982 and contains these lines:

Make him out a lion
so that all who see him
hero worship his
thick chest as I did
moving my mouth
over his back bringing
our hearts to heights
I never hike over
anymore.

I like fiction that makes a home for poetry but there’s always a bit of mystery about the relationship to reality that’s served by the story that contains a poem. In my story I was a young man moved by another man’s poem about an older man.  I found it erotic, the fleeting institution of my story, and the tiny theater of it.

And then there was us, all the poets and writers who had taken part on this day, well actually two nights, Thurs and Friday. These writers were:  Meliza Banales, Justin Chin, Annie Danger, Myriam Gurba, Keith Hennessey, Juba Kalamka, Ali Liebegott, and Michelle Tea.

And what was remarkable was that as a group of writers we were performing a sort public service.  We were herding the community towards their archive. They need to know about it. And not only did we have to find something in the archive that moved us – it had to move us toward a contemplation of activism, and acts of political outrage. When politics show. I felt awe at how if one does something for years – writes -  then when one is tossed a bone, these seven practitioners will throw it back each with their own unique bite mark on it. Less rabbit and more a scarf, I think, the displayed flourish of each poet’s unfurled mind - really like a bow or a plumed hat curlicuing in the air, an antique homage -- of temporary belonging - the room of us were there and the aftershocks of good feeling headed long into the evening.