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By Root 1245 0

night, and Thom took the meals and the shared responsibilities seriously. The commune was comfortable and calm up on the Haight off the Castro on the other side of Market. I brought Thom out to Princeton once to give a reading, but he seemed uncomfortable and failed to convince the audience of his true qualities. He’d lost his confidence and mumbled. He’d retired from teaching poetry at Berkeley and stopped writing; this silence was painful for him. He was also doing a lot of drugs toward the end of his life, mostly connected with sex.

He’d always been fascinated with America. His mother had committed suicide when he was fifteen, and after Trinity he came to the States. Donald Hall, the poet, told me that he’d seen Thom even at that time in full leathers and on a motorcycle, and a great photo shows him looking like a Hells Angel on a bike (it’s a 1963 picture by Mike Kelly). He’s in jeans and motorcycle boots and a tight-fitting black leather jacket and a hood, the only incongruous element his broad smile. One of his early books, My Sad Captains, has a Shakespearian title that seems suitable to all those leather men he liked, though Thom wrote chiseled, formal, rather impersonal poems early on—the influence of Yvor Winters, his teacher at Stanford. Winters, a critic and poet born in the Midwest at the turn of the century, preached an austere, imagistic ideal of formalist poetry, and Gunn responded to it. Fortunately, in the 1980s, AIDS—and the death of many friends—made Gunn a warmer, more expressive poet, especially in his best collection, The Man with Night Sweats (1992). AIDS gave us all a subject and a seriousness that our work had never before possessed. Thom brought to bear on this subject a rigorous technique and quiet control he’d acquired over the years.

Typical of Gunn’s late strong work are these lines, with their beautifully subtle enjambment, written to Mike Kitay:

Nothing is, or will ever be,

Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart

But what we hold in trust

We do hold, even apart.

As the seventies progressed, gay sexual tastes became more and more outré. Gunn celebrated those extremes. He quoted with approval an article in the Village Voice by Ellen Willis in which she said that the lesbian movement of the seventies was not about liberating desire but about extending female solidarity. “For the gay male community,” on the other hand, “solidarity was, at its core, about desire.” I suppose another way of putting that was, lesbianism was to feminism as male homosexuality was … to nothing. There was no fourth term in the equation. Gay men had never suffered as men but had been stripped of male privilege by the straight community. They wanted back what they considered to be their birthright.

Gunn saw gay men in the seventies—the ones who were out there, sexually active—as heirs to the drug-taking hippies. Gays at the saunas were “drug-visionaries.” “At the baths,” Gunn wrote, “or in less organized activity, there was a shared sense of adventure, thrilling, hilarious, experimental.” Gunn saw gays as crossing dramatic, enormous gulfs “on the huge pinions of our sexual momentum.” Referring to a San Francisco baths, Gunn wrote:

This was the Barracks, this the divine rage

In 1975, that time is gone.

All here, of any looks, of any age,

Will get what they are looking for,

Or something close, the rapture they engage

Renewable each night…

I can remember that in the midsixties New York had just one leather bar, and it was inconspicuous and customers would wear their normal clothes and carry a change of costume in a bag, then switch to their chaps and black leather vest in the taxi. They were terrified a friend, even a gay friend, might see them going out in this freaky rig. Sadomasochism still sounded perverted and ever so slightly tacky—sort of New Jersey. And elderly. As if working-class, old gay men who couldn’t compete in the real bars could look appealing in leather, or at least threatening.

By the seventies all that was changing. In 1972 L.A. Plays Itself, a hard-core