Gerhard’s Reviews > Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall > Status Update

'A glass dildo thus resembles a well-made poem. We can pay attention to the thing as a thing, to its appearance, shape and craftsmanship, or look past its materials to its function, or attend to the thing it represents.'

Looking back on RUSH fifty years later, bissett would tell an interviewer, “I still beleev in th langwage revolushyun.”

“the idea that a homoerotically inclined individual is neither fish nor flesh or, in [Virginia] Woolf’s phrase, ‘neither a man nor a woman,’ has made the mermaid an apt symbol … Her dumbness is an obvious trope for the love that dare not speak its name.”

HOW DOES THE FEELING OF LIMERENCE—of being newly, inexhaustibly, totally enmeshed in erotic love—change our sense of time?

Decades after O’Hara’s poem, the science fiction writer and cultural critic Samuel R. Delany would argue, in Times Square Red Times Square Blue (2000), that public or near-public sex between near-strangers amounts to a fundamental (pun intended) hierarchy-shattering cheer for human equality, for a democracy of embodiment, where anyone can desire anyone else, with no barrier as to social status.

Categories and subdivisions of queer experience can multiply indefinitely; some have yet to find a poet in English able to give them memorable words.