The Secret Life of This Life Now #2
What happened to my precocious homoerotic short fiction once I became a college student who wanted to stay nice and safe in his closet
The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.
Trigger Warning: This post includes accounts of gay male manual, oral, and anal sex.
This new section of Beachcomber Mike is a kind of memoir of my first book of poems, This Life Now. The publication of that book was accompanied by a surprising amount of sadness and regret. I suspect other poets have had similar experiences, and I thought it might be worth writing about it in this format.
These essays are also a way for me to share a bit of the book with you, and perhaps motivate you to plunk down ten bucks—including shipping anywhere in the US—to get yourself one of the last 109 copies of the 750 copy print run, all of which are now in my possession. You cannot get the book on Amazon or have your local bookseller order it for you. If you want a copy, you have to go through me. Proceeds go to support Indolent Books, the boutique indie press I started in 2015 as a haven for poets over 50 without a first book, as well as a welcoming place for women writers, writers of color, queer and trans writers, and others who do not fit molds or conform to expectations.
So much of my sense of self-worth was bound up in the publication of This Life Now. I came to poetry late—at about age 30. I did not have a background of college writing workshops, nor had I read very much contemporary poetry. As a college student majoring in comparative literature, aside from the likes of Eliot and Pound in my English classes, and Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Jacques Prévert in my French classes, the emphasis had been on prose fiction. As a graduate student in classics, I was steeped in Ancient Greek and Latin epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry, but I had not read much twentieth century poetry in any language.
As a child I was a voracious reader, and I started writing short stories when I was about 12 years old. One of two of them still exist. Although my favorite one has disappeared. It was called “The Best of Enemies,” and it was a science fiction story about colonists who lived on the floor of the Ocean fighting for their independence from the imperial Surface. The rebel fighters of the Ocean were called gillmen, because they had gills (I forget how they managed that). In my story, a fit young male Surface soldier and a fit young male Ocean rebel gillman get into some hand to hand combat and end up trapped together in an undersea cave.
The only way for the two opposing warriors to get out of there alive is by working together. The whole time they are racing the clock to get out of that cave before they both suffocate and die, they expect their battle to the death to resume once they manage to escape the cave. But when their teamwork finally does get them out of the cave, their eyes meet in silent acknowledgment of the ordeal they have shared, and in a profound sense of their shared humanity. And instead of fighting to the death, they slowly turn and go back to their respective military bases.
Okay, so that story is more homoerotic in my head than it was on the page. Although I do think I managed to convey that the military opponents had certain kinds of feelings for each other. Or anybody for whom the story was coded would have mentally inserted that element themselves.
As my tweens progressed into my teens, I continued to write homoerotic short fiction. Never explicit. But filled with the erotic tension of unspoken desire.
But when I got to college—a still all-male Columbia University, where I had a full ride as a Pulitzer Scholar—I suddenly found myself very self-conscious about my only barely self-acknowledged gayness. I carried this classic black and white marble composition notebook around with me, but I would not write any fiction in it. Soon I realized that the only stories I wanted to write were gay coming of age stories, but I did not want to write gay coming of age stories, because I was not ready to disclose to anyone that I was gay, even through the veil of fiction.
So I went fiction silent. For ten years. From about 18 to 28 I did not write anything except term papers, first for college, then for grad school.
Okay, this is getting too long to sustain my focus, so I am going to cut to the part of the post where I share a few lines of the next sequential poem in This Life Now and tell a bit about it.
Let me repeat for any newcomers: The first section of This Life Now is called My First Ten Plague Years. The plague in question is AIDS. Today we are up to the second poem in that section, called “Prologue.” At the start of the poem, the speaker notes that thinking about his recent HIV infection leads him into the “endless regression” of his own past. The excerpt below begins at line 7 of the poem.
The first time I got fucked was in 1984. We already knew what was risky— I took his cum anyway. They barely had a virus yet, so I chose to believe it was something else: poppers or multiple partners— some cofactor of a gayness I was too ingénue to have indulged.
The first guy who penetrated me was a guy I met on the subway after riding the Long Island Railroad back from a visit to my oldest brother and his family in Port Washington. The guy’s name was Robert. I’ve had a number of Roberts over the years, or should I say, to paraphrase John Lennon in “Norwegian Wood,” they had me. Robert rode all the way back to Coney Island with me, which is where I grew up. By then it was nighttime. I led him under the elevated subway tracks to some secluded spot on the other side of the chain link fence from the basketball courts adjacent to the high rise Mitchell-Lama co-op where I lived (or as I like to call it, subsidized housing for poor white people). That night it was just manual and oral. We continued seeing each other for a few weeks, in the course of which he took my anal virginity. It was new and scary and great. That is the young man I was thinking of, and that was the episode I was alluding to, in “Prologue.”
Okay. That’s quite enough for now. Maybe you should go pray, or hug your spouse, or call your grandchildren. I wish I could.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...now. The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes—Get this!—includes SHIPPING. In the US, that is; if you are elsewhere, I will probably need to get in touch with you and ask you for some additional funds for shipping.
Scheduling Note: I am going to try to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:15am eastern time. And other new sections of Beachcomber Mike may be starting soon. I’ll keep you posted.
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I love the excerpt from the poem!
Yes, I love the excerpt too and look forward to the book! Also as I said in a note, I am relating to the silence and the closet and not writing for so many years.