Poems Found in Notebooks #2
Jeune Homme Nu — July 7, 2018
This is the second in a new series of posts, each of which will feature a poem found in one of my notebooks or journals that go back decades. As with the series Pub Crawl, which features my poems published in journals, each poem in this series will be accompanied by a mix of autobiographical context and craft-oriented notes. As you read, bear in mind that the text is a largely unedited draft lifted right out of a notebook—This series is more about process than perfection. Enjoy!
Jeune Homme Nu
I saw that young man nude
some thirty-five years ago
at the Louvre
and felt him in my stomach
like a figure of speech
felt some kind of pain
lost some kind of breath
for a slow moment—
One of those galleries at the Louvre
where the paintings hang from floor to ceiling
where you stand about twenty feet from the wall
and cast your gaze
slowly over the paintings
from those at your feet your knees your thighs
to those at your waist belly chest
to those at your throat, those at eye level
and then to those above your head—
Your head rotates back,
your eyes roll back somewhat—
All of this happens much more quickly
than the telling of it here;
but I tell it this way to slow it down—
to imitate the experience
of that day at the Louvre
that winter day, a day or two
on either side of New Year's 1983—
I've graduated Columbia a semester early.
I've come to Paris with my lesbian girlfriend
for her intersession and the beginning of my “adult” life.
I'm not “out,” but my deviant sexuality is a poorly guarded secret.
In the time between the occurrence of these events
and the writing of these verses
ground has shifted, the meanings of words have changed—
words about what is natural and what is normal
old words have new meanings
old words have lost meaning
new words have taken their places
I bring this up / raise this issue
because this incident will mean
different things to different people
of different sexes and gender identities
and different generations....Notes
Below is a startlingly beautiful image of Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer (Young Male Nude Seated Beside the Sea), an oil painting on canvas by the French artist Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864), painted in 1836.
A premise of this series is that I reproduce the poems more or less as found in whichever notebook. Not surprisingly, then, this draft does not feel quite coherent to me. I feel like there is a turn after the line: I'm not “out,” but my deviant sexuality is a poorly guarded secret. To me, the poem feels like it wants to keep going in that memoiristic vein. But it doesn’t. Instead, it goes meta.
When I say, “ground has shifted,” I am referring to the evolution of—well, that’s just it: the evolution of what, precisely? Ah, now I see why the poem takes that precise turn at that precise point: it’s the phrase “deviant sexuality” that sends the poem in a new direction. So you could say the ground that has shifted is the ground under “the closet,” the ground under that cypher for the historical unspeakability of gay white maleness.
And that observation leads me to share with you this fact: Jeune homme nu—of which this poem is a kind of ekphrasis manqué—is iconic in gay male culture, presumably for as long as something that can reasonably be called “gay male culture” has existed. Now, I did not know that fact when I saw the painting for the first time in the Louvre on that day around January 1, 1983. That is, I did not know it cognitively; but I would have to say that I knew it, as it were, in my gut, in the solar plexus that got kicked but good at the sight of that painting.
I mean, literally, what I thought in the moment that I saw that painting was, “Yeah, I’m gay.” The experience was that visceral and that irrefutable. And I had been that unsure of my sexuality! Not that I didn’t know I liked boys; I mean, oh my God, did I know that I liked boys! But that wasn’t the same thing as knowing that I was gay.
I bought a print of Jeune homme nu that day at the Louvre, which remains one of my most treasured possessions today.
When I got back from that trip, I began to see images of Jeune homme nu in ads for viatical settlements in gay newspapers and magazines, from the New York Native to Christopher Street to beloved bar rags like HX (known informally as Homo Extra). That’s the first inkling I had that Jeune homme nu, which I thought had been my own private discovery, was in fact gay community property.
Viatical settlements, for those of you who are lucky enough not to know, are financial arrangements whereby a terminally ill person collects on their life insurance policy in exchange for relinquishing the settlement rights of their stated beneficiaries. In the 1980s, gay men with AIDS were cashing out their life insurance policies in droves, and Jeune homme nu was being used to advertise this product in a highly effective way to the target market.
I mean, how macabre was that as a way for me, at the age of 22, to learn about the hallowed iconography of the gay community in which I had so recently enrolled?
Hey! I think I just wrote a prose version of the new stanza that belongs in this poem.
Okay, so this is getting long, and needs to stop, but I just want to mention quickly that the second part of the poem is also, and primarily, talking about the notions of gender and sexuality developed by younger millennials and zoomers (members of Gen Z). This generation veritably reinvented the concept of transgender while articulating new concepts including cisgender, nonbinary gender, and gender nonconformity. I have struggled with those conceptual innovations, and scorned them, and misunderstood them, and felt alienated by them—But I can no longer question their validity or their endurance.
ground has shifted, the meanings of words have changed— words about what is natural and what is normal old words have new meanings old words have lost meaning new words have taken their places
If you liked this post, please consider clicking the ❤️ below. I welcome your comments, too, on the poem itself, or any aspect of this post, or anything you would like to share about the writing or reading of poetry.
For example, your orientation is no longer regarded as "deviant," but a perfectly normal variation, found globally among early and advanced cultures, and also among all higher mammals and many bird species. So there goes the "outlaw" status.