A Masque of Difference and Likeness: On Michael Nott’s “Thom Gunn”

THOM GUNN’S 1954 poem “Tamer and Hawk” uses a conceit of domestication to capture an erotic dynamic of not-quite-total submission: You seeled me with your love, I am blind to other birds— The habit of your words Has hooded me. […] Through having only eyes For you I fear to lose, I lose to keep, […]

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THOM GUNN’S 1954 poem “Tamer and Hawk” uses a conceit of domestication to capture an erotic dynamic of not-quite-total submission:

You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds—
The habit of your words
Has hooded me. […]

Through having only eyes
For you I fear to lose,
I lose to keep, and choose
Tamer as prey.

Seeling involves closing the eyes of the hawk by drawing a fine thread through its lids. In this poem, desire, conditioned by language, is a blind intensity, but the final lines promise the reclamation of agency from a subordinated position: the bird’s ascetic focus on its trainer allows it to perceive the basic unfreedom of love. The coded queerness of this early work can be compared with a poem published almost half a century later. “Troubadour” is a dark aria about domination and submission written from the perspective of Jeffrey Dahmer, the now-Netflix-famous cannibal:

             I thought that you were gone,
         But you are here and will remain with me.
         Your long hair floods the pillow that we share
         Across the mattress we lie quietly on.
         I trust your mute consent in which I’m free
             To strip your body bare.

Michael Nott’s brilliant and necessary new biography Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a comprehensive study of a major poet’s investigations of the paradoxical liberation and constraint of queer desire. From the 1970s onwards, Gunn was transparent about his “cool queer life” (a paraphrase from a Thomas Hardy poem): his work boldly explores cruising, BDSM, polyamory, group sex, and drug use, yet these explorations are often routed through complex metaphors, dramatic speakers, or, most commonly, an ironized, detached, almost sociological style of lyric observation (Gunn repudiated the postwar injunction to write poetry with “voice”). This approach led to a contradictory reception: some critics found the work embarrassingly personal while others were turned off by the sense of cold, formal distance.

Gunn’s intimate remove is connected to the “theory of pose” he developed while studying at Cambridge: “Everyone plays a part, whether he knows it or not, so he might as well deliberately design a part, or series of parts, for himself.” This theory of the pose was originally inflected by an undergraduate (and generational) infatuation with existentialism. As it developed across his life and work, however, Gunn’s theory of the pose became a complex aesthetic philosophy of identity. By turning personal experience into raw material without emphasizing the personality of experience, Gunn unpicks assumptions of individuality and its association with style. He wanted to write biographically without resorting to sentiment or the airing of personal trauma. (He was horrified by—and quite horrible about—the poetry of Sylvia Plath.) To affect this queer impersonality, Gunn turned to the history of the lyric. In an interview with the poets John Tranter and August Kleinzahler, he declared: “I’m not aiming for central personality. […] I want to write with the same anonymity that you get in the Elizabethans and I want to move around between forms in the same way somebody like Ben Jonson did. At the same time I want to write in my own century.”

As in the poetry of Renaissance courtiers, the voice on the page appears so intimate while still referring to a general social type and to love as a categorical and structural experience. Staking a claim between confessional writing and conceptualism, Gunn’s cleverly archaic lyrics are not reducible to a postmodern skepticism about the possibility of interiority and depth; rather, he dramatizes the experiential depth and dynamism that emanate from seemingly shared structures of selfhood.

Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, in 1929, the child of Herbert, a Fleet Street editor, and Charlotte, a charismatic bourgeois socialist. His life was transformed by his mother’s suicide when he was just 15. Nott opens his biography with the report of a policeman arriving at a Hampstead townhouse to find two young boys in the garden and a woman’s body by the fireplace. Gunn revisited this traumatic memory in the poem “The Gas-poker”:

One image from the flow
Sticks in the stubborn mind:
A sort of backwards flute.
The poker that she held up
Breathed from the holes aligned
Into her mouth till, filled up
By its music, she was mute.

Gunn could only finish drafting “The Gas-poker” once he changed the title from “Finding Mother,” a testimony to his reticence about personal disclosure. As Nott notes, the poem is written in the third person, and he never refers to his mother as “Mother,” only as “she” or “her,” despite the availability of possible rhymes (“other,” “brother”). Addressing his mother, Gunn once drafted a poem that read, “If it is true / to say that [living with] you made me queer, / it is equally true / to say you made me a poet.” After her death, Gunn’s youth was marked by a series of estrangements: from his father, from cosmopolitan comfort (he swapped Hampstead for his aunts’ austere farm in unfashionable Snodland), and, eventually, from England.

Gunn moved to the United States at 25 to study at Stanford with literary critic Yvor Winters, who became an important mentor. Gunn liked to refer to himself as a “mid-Atlantic poet,” as though his work was the literary equivalent of the clipped and mannered accents of the Golden Age of Hollywood. One of the attractions of Gunn’s poetry is the way he makes the habitus of Britain and the United States rub up against each other. As his career developed, he was able to capture, with sensitivity and humility, the ironies and vanities of his adopted culture, alongside its charms and seductions—an America of pleasure and risk, consumption and compulsion; a place of weak selves and strong egos, of bourgeois cowboys and life-as-style, of queer vitality and formalized precarity, of eros and its cruelty.

But before he fell in love with America, he fell in love with an American. At Cambridge, he met the aspiring actor Mike Kitay. Their early life in the US was difficult: they lived, for a while, in sweltering, stultifying San Antonio, where Kitay completed his military service. The army investigated their relationship, which almost resulted in Gunn being deported and Kitay court-martialed. (Gunn told the military police, with pointed irony, “I’m absolutely certain that Mike could not be homosexual, because I’ve lived with him so long [that] if anyone knew about this I would.”) Though Kitay was Gunn’s lifelong love, they were not exclusive partners. Kitay was “serially monogamous,” while Gunn used the stability of their emotional bond to pursue casual sex with many and multiple partners. Kitay was the subject of “Tamer and Hawk,” and their complex attachment informed Gunn’s idiosyncratic approach to poetic autonomy, the sense that we never entirely belong to ourselves. (Nott dedicates the biography to Kitay, and the bibliography reveals that they had almost two dozen interviews.)

Eventually, Kitay and Gunn settled in the Bay Area. Gunn got a job in the English department at UC Berkeley in 1958 but eventually turned down tenure, preferring to teach one semester a year and spend the rest of his time writing. When Gunn won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971, he used the $25,000 prize to put down a deposit on a duplex in the Haight-Ashbury district. Here, Gunn and Kitay lived with their friends and lovers in a kind of queer commune they dubbed “the family.” Gunn’s life choices did not make him rich, nor did they make writing easy (writer’s block was a consistent challenge), nor were the sexual politics of the household straightforward (Nott details the delicate politics required to move Kitay’s ex, Bill, upstairs to give more space to Kitay and his new partner, Bob). Still, one can only admire Gunn’s carefully calibrated life of art, pleasure, freedom, and community.

Gunn wrote about his queer experiences of drug use, polyamory, cruising, and BDSM as though they had happened to someone else. Because, in a sense, they did. It was the central paradox of his life: he felt most himself when he escaped himself, whether at bathhouses or on an LSD trip. Gunn liked the way acid decentered selfhood: “It was completely incredible, life was a complete flowing so that nothing had a permanent identity, least of all myself.” During one of his first trips, he mistook his lover for his mother, and his friend for his brother, and then he climbed to the roof and had a conversation with God. “What age am I in?” he asked his assembled friends, and one replied: “Nearing middle-age, dear.” He recorded that day in his poem, “At the Centre”:

         What place is this
                                 And what is it that broods
         Barely beyond its own creation’s course,
         And not abstracted from it, not the Word,
         But overlapping like the wet low clouds
         The rivering images—their unstopped source,
         Its roar unheard from being always heard.
         What am
                        Though in the river, I abstract
         Fence. word. and notion. On the stream at full
         A flurry, where the mind rides separate!
         But this brief cresting, sharpened and exact,
         Is fluid too, is open to the pull
         And on the underside twined deep with it.

What makes this a rare example of a successful, interesting poem about being high is the way that it refuses to let go of form. It still presumes an “I,” even though it floats on a river of words. In the theory of the pose, acid seemed to both exaggerate and obliterate the player’s masks.

Gunn’s depictions of a cool queer life also contained a critique of queerness’s attachment to coolness. His poems skewer the pretensions and inflations of queer culture, its normative nonnormativity. As an example, the poem “Seesaw” explores the act of cruising for public sex through the conceit of suburban playground equipment. In a bathhouse poem, “Saturday Night,” Gunn is interested in moments when meaningful difference dissolves: “In our community of the carnal hear[t] / Some lose conviction in mid-arc of play.” But gay culture doesn’t have to be a utopia, or even change a city, to be meaningful:

                                If, furthermore, 
         Our Dionysian experiment 
                  To build a city never dared before 
         Dies without reaching to its full extent, 
                  At least in the endeavour we translate 
         Our common ecstasy to a brief ascent.

Gunn did not valorize BDSM and struggled to reconcile it with his hippieish and bohemian conception of love: “I say that bdsm is a form of love […] but I don’t think that goes quite deep enough. Is it compulsive behavior perhaps, and how does it relate to my conscious values?” Gunn’s long poem on the Dore Alley Fair leather festival, which surveys social diversity and sexual perversity (“The fog burns off and the crowd mingles promiscuously / they gaze at each other with a lazy desire”), concludes ambivalently, “we play, at the barriers, the Masque of Difference and Likeness.”

Gunn was still happy to play the part of the “transgressive” poet. He was thrilled when a local gay paper described him as “nouveau riche leather-man Thom Gunn.” He wore those leathers to readings at Yale and would casually expose his forearm tattoos to shocked undergraduates at Berkeley (of course, it would now be difficult to find a queer poet and lecturer without tattoos). He wrote, “I have no illusions about the true value of my image. It’s a pose, but when somebody wears a suit he is posing as much as I am.” The equivalence here works both ways: it is not just a point about queer artifice; it also describes bourgeois self-fashioning. Lifestyle is an old-fashioned and vaguely offensive word to apply to homosexuality, but it’s one that gels with Gunn’s approach to sexual difference. He understood, before most, that even the most “radical” queer scenes do not resist capitalist culture, they just restyle it. At the same time, even Gunn’s nonsexual poems capture something of the tension and excitement of sex. In a sense, he cruised the reader: “A good poem is simultaneously a tentative and risky cruising, a complete possession and orgasm, and a huge leather orgy.”

Gunn put his style of lyric impersonality to best use in his poetry about the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Gunn wanted to capture the experiences of his friends without liberal sentimentality or trite appeals to sympathy. The final section of his most famous volume, The Man with Night Sweats (1992), is almost entirely composed of moving elegies written for close friends. And yet, drawing again from Renaissance examples (particularly John Donne’s writing about the plague), Gunn gave these intimate portraits a generalized character. Take the ending of “Still Life”:

I shall not soon forget
The angle of his head,
Arrested and reared back
On the crisp field of bed,
Back from what he could neither
Accept, as one opposed,
Nor, as a life-long breather,
Consentingly let go,
The tube his mouth enclosed
In an astonished O.

As the dark pun of the title suggests, the poem offers an ekphrastic meditation on the exact transition between life and death. The arresting and arrested final image tellingly inverts the relationship between breath and mortality in “The Gas-poker.”

One of the discoveries of Nott’s biography (and the volume of Gunn’s letters he co-edited with Clive Wilmer and August Kleinzahler in 2022) involves the poet’s personal reflections on neoliberalism in Reagan’s America. Gunn was troubled by homelessness, immigration policy, inequality, and the increasingly instrumental approach to cultural value. Although Gunn has not been considered a political poet, these concerns were in the poetry all along: elegies in The Man with Night Sweats develop themes of vitality and precarity that Gunn then maps onto the streets of gentrifying San Francisco; from the balletic daring of a teenager in “Skateboard” to defiant flowers growing on footpaths (“Nasturtium”), his poems vivify a politics of survival under neoliberalism. Gunn’s lyrics therefore addressed a social crisis in intimate terms, and intimate loss through abstract forms.

Gunn’s poetic theory of the pose offers an alternative to the commodification of difference that sustains much of today’s literary market. In contrast to queer theory and queer politics, queer poetry today often revels in the personal. The figure of the “cool queer poet” has now ossified into cliché: with an airy and ironic tone, the speaker demonstrates, rather didactically, the moral value of their sexual difference through poems that feature traumatic disclosures balanced against camp riffs, sex-phrasis, and Frank O’Hara–style name-dropping. Politically, the poems do not feature identity politics so much as ego politics: a blend of soft-left convictions, radical-chic pretensions, histrionic sincerity, and political solipsism (“In many ways, this rave is a protest …”). Gunn resisted these tendencies, in the process authoring some of most original lyric poetry of the last century. To tell the story of Gunn’s life, Nott’s book elegantly braids together the poet’s own words from his journals, letters, interviews, and poems. It gives a singular portrait of a writer whose reflexive coolness informs an essential queerness, whose lyric voice is undergirded by a complex latticework of attachment, loss, and desire.

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