Never By Itself Alone : Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and the Bay Area, 1944—Present

Providing an unprecedented exploration of key moments in queer literary history, Never By Itself Alone changes our sense of both the American literary and political landscapes from the late 1940s through the 21st century. Grundy presents the first comprehensive history of post-war queer writing in Boston and San Francisco, intertwining analysis of lesbian, gay, and queer writing, and insisting on the link between activism and literature. The book centers a host of underrepresented writers, especially writers of color and those with gender non-conforming identities, and challenges the Stonewall exceptionalism of queer historiography. Starting with Robert Duncan's 1944 essay, 'The Homosexual in Society', one of the first significant public defenses of homosexuality in the US, Grundy takes the reader through pioneering works by queer voices of the era, including Adrian Stanford's Black and Queer , the first published book by an out, Black gay poet in the US; the Boston collective Fag Rag and their radical reconsideration of family, private property and the State; the Combahee River Collective, whose Black Feminist analysis drew together race, class, and sexuality; the anthology This Bridge Called My Back , in which women of color spoke truth to power, together; and New Narrative writing, which audaciously mixed Marxism, porn and gossip while uniting against the New Right. Linking these works to the context which produced them, Grundy uncovers the communities formed around activism and small press publishing during this era and elevates neglected voices to narrate a history that before now has never been told in its entirety. Drawing on extensive archival research, Never By Itself Alone is a rigorous and unmatched work of both literary criticism and queer scholarship which underscores the vital importance of radical accounts of race, class, and gender in any queer studies worthy of the name. Cover Never By Itself Alone Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: ‘Never by itself alone’ Prelude Chapter Summaries Why Boston and the Bay? Methodology and Focus Questions of Publication From Homosexual Tradition to Queer Lineage ‘meet their end upon the ground’ Part I Beginnings (1944–​1969) 1. ‘Homosexuals in Society’: Poetry and Gay Community in the 1940s Introduction ‘The Homosexual in Society’: Gay Identity and the Future of America The Young and Evil ‘The mind’s /​ natural jungle’: Race, Sexuality, and Identity ‘One day we’ll see how a black man really feels’ ‘Creating New Worlds’: The Berkeley Renaissance The King’s Two Cities From the Renaissance to the Household Coda: ‘Being so far abroad from what he once was’ 2. Identity and Community in the Work of Jack Spicer Introduction ‘What have I lost?’: The Berkeley Renaissance and the Mattachine Spicer in Boston ‘Five Boston cats blowing their poetry REAL hard’ ‘Poetry is public property’: the Boston Newsletter ‘No place to turn’: The Oliver Charming Notebooks Sex and the Single Poem The Heads of the Town up to the Aether: Spicer’s Coming Community Return to San Francisco and the Spicer Circle ‘the figure of a person at once lost and unlikely’ ‘the city we create’ Open Spaces: The Magazines of the Spicer Circle ‘An Apparition of the Late J’ Love Poems and Protestant Letters: Open Space Community and Negativity in Spicer’s Final Work ‘Alone we are dangerous’: Community/​Revolution The Pacific Nation ‘People are starving’: Book of Magazine Verse Messages from Actual Conditions: Spicer’s Afterlives 3. The Occult School of Boston (i): ‘Levels above and below’ (Ed Marshall and Stephen Jonas) ‘An occult school, unknown’ ‘A diabolical devout’: The Case of Ed Marshall ‘Leave the word alone it is dangerous’ ‘A covering and an unloading’: Hellan, Hellan ‘Dialogue against Dialogue’: Stephen Jonas ‘another excursion into fantasy’: Jonas’ ‘anti-​biographies’ ‘Remember me kindly’: Love, The Poem, The Sea ‘From one Martian to another’: Jonas and Jack Spicer ‘Boston Lingo’ and the American Idiom ‘one completed poem’: Poetry and Love ‘in hell /​ already’: Jonas’ later work 4. The Occult School of Boston (ii): ‘Queer Shoulders at the Wheel’ (John Wieners and Gerrit Lansing) ‘never forget where we come from’: John Wieners Early Poems: Wieners in the Boston Newsletter ‘a show of junkies, cocksuckers, THIEVES’: Wieners and Measure ‘It is my life you save’: San Francisco and The Hotel Wentley Poems Gerrit Lansing’s Gay Age of Aquarius ‘Exuberant and restless disorder’: Gerrit Lansing in New York ‘The Burden of SET’ ‘Naming is gaming’ Coda: ‘Rise, Shining Martyrs’ Part II Gay Liberation in Boston (1969–​1983) 5. ‘A Gay Presence’: John Wieners, Charley Shively, and Fag Rag ‘The most loathsome publication in the English language’ ‘acts of revolution’: Charley Shively ‘New love, encountered between strangers’ ‘Hacking, stuffing and reshelving’ ‘There’s a certain kind of men’ ‘The Problem of Madness’ 6. ‘My Real Name’: Racial Framings, Queer Imaginings ‘no cosmic ribbon’ ‘loving he and him’: Prince-​Eusi Ndugu Black and Queer: Adrian Stanford Stephania Byrd: ‘violence not new /​ but old’ ‘to strike the spirit of my history’: Maurice Kenny’s Queered Spaces Gay Appropriations 7. ‘We cannot live without our lives’: From the Combahee River Collective to This Bridge Called My Back Introduction Conditions: The Combahee River Collective 1979 ‘Why Did They Die?’ ‘A Chorale for Black Woman Voices’: Audre Lorde’s ‘Need’ From Metaphor to Movement: This Bridge Called My Back This Bridge and Kitchen Table Press ‘Making some sense of the trip’ ‘The Bridge Poem’: Kate Rushin Conclusion: Bridges to the Future, Survivals of the Past Part III Bay Area Communities: Lesbian Feminism to the AIDS Era (1969–​present) 8. ‘She Who’: Judy Grahn and Bay Area Gay Women’s Liberation ‘A very dangerous box to fall out of’ Edward the Dyke as Gender Outlaw ‘On the Development of a Purple Fist’ The Common Woman and a Common Poetics A Woman is Talking to Death ‘all the sides of it’ 9. ‘The first everything’: Pat Parker ‘& a woman was born’: Parker’s Early Years Coming Out and Coming to Poetry Movements in Black ‘I have gained many sisters’: ‘Womanslaughter’ ‘Where do you go to become a non-​citizen?’ Conclusion: On Simplicity, Class, and Literary Judgement 10. ‘blasting the true story into breath’: Writing, Work, and Socialist Feminism The Third World Student Strike, the WWU, and Asian-​American Lesbian Writing ‘we are the clatter of type /​ in your dreams’: Poetry and Work ‘Sitting at the Machine, Thinking’ ‘Do You Read What You’re Typing?’ ‘Polymorphously Perverse’ ‘No One Immune’ 11. New Narrative, New Communities from Left Write to AIDS New Narrative and the Possibility of a Gay Left ‘Gay Sunrise’ ‘A Community of the Future’: Century of Clouds Organizing for Unity: Left Write ‘A village common producing images’: New Narrative After Left Write New Narrative in the Era of AIDS Enola Gay The Bathhouse in the Era of AIDS Of AIDS and the Undead: Real and The Letters of Mina Harker ‘I saw something I can’t remember’: Kevin Killian’s Argento Series Coda: ‘When politics show’ ‘Inaudible substance of catastrophe’ The End of Gender, Coast to Coast ‘To tell you stories’ Notes Works Cited Index