It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.
My dearest friend in the movement is Jack Nichols. If there were no such thing as gay or straight, we would still talk and share experiences till the end of time.
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.
When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.
It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.
I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!
I think also there was a lot of coming to terms with where I am in life, where I fit in as a gay man in America, and getting more comfortable with who I am.
At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.
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