[Reader-list] Thom Gunn: Pleasure, Eroticism, Domestic Stability

[Vivek Narayanan]

Fascinating, longish essay on the poetry of Thom Gunn, a Brit poet who 
replanted himself on the west coast, wrote often strictly formal poems 
but on sometimes radical themes--see below.

Vivek

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=236878

Sex, Drugs, and Thom Gunn by Tom Sleigh : Poetry Magazine [article/magazine]
The life and work of a true servant of eros.

by Tom Sleigh

A year before Thom Gunn died in 2004, he told me about going to visit 
a sex club—he wrote about such experiences, so I don’t think there’s any 
reason not to speak about them. Since I’m straight, he described it with 
all the precision of someone describing the more technical aspects of 
going rafting down the Colorado River—the club had two floors, one for 
gays, one for straights, and if you were gay you could pay a little more 
and descend among the straights, but if you were straight, you couldn’t 
ascend to be among the gays. There were little tents to go into when 
you’d found someone, and of course there was more. I like to check 
myself on stories told to me by friends, and when I went online to find 
out more for this essay, I found a place in San Francisco called the 
Power Exchange that answered to some of what I remember him saying. But 
not all. There are different floors, but there’s a bottom floor with a 
dungeon and bondage room, for a total of three floors, not two. And 
there was no mention of tents, but rather theme playrooms: among others, 
an ancient Egyptian room, a boxing ring, and a series of cubicles that 
would seem to form a maze called Asshole Alley. There is different 
pricing, but not as straightforwardly gay/straight as I remember. And of 
course, it’s possible he was talking about a different club altogether. 
What I’m certain of is this: Regardless of the no drugs or alcohol 
policies, Thom talked about the drugs people were on: Viagra, obviously, 
but more to the point, speed (methamphetamine), PCP (AKA angel dust), 
and ecstasy, though it was Thom’s impression that more straights were 
into that.

* * *

That sex and drugs go together should be no surprise to anyone, and in 
Thom Gunn’s poems they become dual aspects of eros: on the one hand, 
drugs and sex can open us up to vistas of human freedoms and 
discoveries; and, on the other, they can lead to darker recognitions 
about the world and ourselves. Gunn’s poems explore both aspects in a 
way that is compassionate, nuanced, and wide-ranging in scope. So let’s 
start with Gunn’s attitude toward drugs. I had long known that he used 
them—for that matter, so had I, speed, heroin, marijuana, a lot of 
psychedelics—and drug use was one of the bonds of our friendship. I 
don’t mean that we did drugs together, for we weren’t friends in that 
way. But I mean the psychological predisposition behind our drug use, 
the kinds of assumptions we shared about what drugs could teach you, how 
they opened up avenues of self-knowledge and wide-ranging spiritual and 
social understandings that would ordinarily be closed to you. You always 
took drugs for pleasure, of course, but part of that pleasure was the 
possibilities they gave you to test what it meant to be a human being. 
You might say that Gunn disagreed with Samuel Johnson when Johnson said 
that you didn’t need to experience evil in order to shun it—though Gunn 
never thought of drugs as evil: rather, drugs were part of the pleasure 
of people who have a romance with experience and, for better and worse, 
take seriously the choices and obsessions that such a romance involves 
you in, willy-nilly.

In a Jefferson Airplane song that was something of a psychedelic anthem, 
Gracie Slick’s exhortatory, I’m-verging-on-ecstatic, sandpaper growl 
spoke to the feeling of transformative power that drugs held for a 
certain kind of user:

One pill makes you larger,
and one pill makes you small,
and the ones that Mother gives you
don’t do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
when she’s ten feet tall.

These lyrics convey a disinterested, deeply curious fascination with the 
nuances of human personality as it’s illuminated by drugs. In Gunn’s 
poem “Listening to Jefferson Airplane,” the physical phenomenon of the 
music, as it “comes and goes on the wind,” is mirrored by its 
psychological effect as it “comes and goes on the brain.” In that sense, 
you could say that using drugs at a concert was a kind of laboratory to 
learn about human behavior and the workings of your own mind; hanging 
out with friends and the subtle and not-so-subtle transformations that 
you and they underwent was one of the things about drugs that Gunn most 
liked and that these lines, in both the song and his poem, point to.

And along with his attitude toward drugs, there was an ethos about 
erotic play that he wrote about in an essay, “My Life up to Now,” in 
which he discusses what his experiences in the sixties and early 
seventies had meant to him: a communitarian ethos of pleasure and of how 
pleasure and social equality were based on the freedom to give our 
sexual natures and desires full expression. As Gunn wrote of the 
Geysers, a hot-springs area in Sonoma County north of San Francisco:

Everyone walked around naked, swimming in the cool stream by day and at 
night staying in the hot baths until early in the morning. Heterosexual 
and homosexual orgies sometimes overlapped: there was an attitude of 
benevolence and understanding on all sides that could be extended, I 
thought, into the rest of the world. When I remember that small, 
changing society of holidays and weekends, I picture a great communal 
embrace. For what is the point of a holiday if we cannot carry it back 
into working days? There is no good reason why that hedonistic and 
communal love of the Geysers could not be extended to the working life 
of the towns. Unless it is that human beings contain in their emotions 
some homeostatic device by which they must defeat themselves just as 
they are learning their freedom.

This was before AIDS, of course—but I remember even after the Plague, as 
it came to be called, had claimed many of Gunn’s friends, he still 
insisted that he believed deeply in those values; and he once told me 
that he doubted he could really trust or be good friends with anybody 
who didn’t share them. Not that he didn’t have a profound understanding 
of the workings of the less savory aspects of sexual self-knowledge 
and becoming—and his image of a homeostatic device of the emotions 
displays a profound pessimism at the heart of his generous, radically 
visionary view of sexual pleasure as a revolutionary force. But a force 
also accompanied by depression, paranoia, self-suspicion, 
self-alienation, jealousy, and despair.

His poetic sequence “The Menace” deals with all these emotions, in 
which “in a theatre of reflection/I encounter again/the exemplary 
figure” who is “inducted by himself/into an army of fantasy” and is at once:

guard father
executioner angel of death
delivering doctor judge
cop castrator

the-one-who-wants-to-get-me

As a form of paranoid projection, “the menace” “leaps from the 
night/fully armed, a djinn/of human stature” whose “hands hang 
heavy/gloved for obscure purpose,” and the lovers, in the course of the 
poem, give their bodies, too: “his arms/were our arms, his sperm 
ours./His terror became/our play.” In these lines, the menace goes from 
being a djinn to a threatening, heavy-gloved figure, to a composite 
figure of both their bodies, in which, during sexual play, they become 
one inside the body of love, their sperm and arms fusing into the act of 
making love, both love as sexual pleasure as well as the founding of a 
new identity. And so “the-one-who-wants-to-get-me” starts out as a 
paranoid projection and by poem’s end has metamorphosed into “a cheerful 
man in workclothes” who “stumbles off grinning/‘Bye babe gotta get 
to the job.’” The menace as a projection of the speaker’s paranoid 
consciousness becomes assimilated into the dailiness of domestic routine.

This transformation of terror into play and the consoling rhythms of 
domesticity suggest that however much our sexuality is tied in to our 
darker emotions, “the great communal embrace” of the Geysers has the 
power to remake the way we envision our desires as we project them onto 
others and experience their projections onto us. At the same time, the 
communality of the embrace stands apart from the “tea for two, you for 
me, me for you” trope of monogamous, exclusive, heterosexual love. In 
fact, as Gunn says, such an embrace brought back from holiday would 
change “the working life of the towns.” The subversiveness of the notion 
and the political implications of that subversion are wide sweeping. If 
the basis of democracy is the body and bodily pleasure, as the image of 
a communal embrace at least partly suggests, then why shouldn’t sexual 
hedonism become one of the central values of the democratic contract? 
And why shouldn’t drugs be one of the tools that help the body politic 
to achieve that contract’s fulfillment?

Certainly Gunn is speaking as poet and not prophet (orgies fueled by 
poppers in the Bank of America bank vault come to mind!), but the ideal 
of this embrace exists as an abiding conviction and underwrites all 
Gunn’s poetry. For the poet, “the passages of joy,” in Samuel Johnson’s 
phrase, are not only erogenous but civic as well. And lest this seem too 
utopian, not to say soft-headed, a conviction, I want to again stress 
that Gunn was all too aware, even at the height of his “belief in the 
possibilities of change,” that “we all continue to carry the same 
baggage: in my world, Christian does not shed his burden, only his 
attitude to it alters.” But as he also says, his life “insists on 
continuities.” And so even though the “great sweep of the acid years” 
has been denounced by conservatives and liberals alike for its embrace 
of drugs and hedonism, I deeply admire Gunn’s faithfulness to that 
vision: “everything that we glimpsed—the trust, the brotherhood, the 
repossession of innocence, the nakedness of spirit—is still a 
possibility and will continue to be so.”

At the same time, his need for domesticity is an inherent part of that 
vision, as suggested by how “the-one-who-wants-to-get-me,” in all its 
erotic thrill and chill, becomes the ordinary man whom Gunn sleeps next 
to, his body cupping “the fine warm back,/broad fleshed shoulder 
blades.” So just as Gunn puts a premium on sexual freedom, he evinces an 
equal need for domestic stability. And while Gunn speaks about the 
dangers of using a poet’s biography to narrow the meanings of his poems 
in a way that diminishes them, I think it’s instructive that his home 
life also reflected his communitarian spirit: he lived in a group house, 
with housemates, in which each in turn cooked dinner on assigned nights 
of the week. It was a remarkably stable arrangement and lasted from 
1971, when Gunn bought the house on Cole Street in the Haight, until his 
death in 2004. During that time, Gunn had many lovers and sexual 
partners, but he also spent thirty-three years with the same housemates. 
Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—as Gunn says in his poem “Transients and 
Residents,” “I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men”—aren’t 
necessarily incompatible with personal loyalty, homebodiness, and 
domestic stability.

Of course, I’m betraying typical heterosexual, basically monogamous 
biases/hangups here: whoever said that domestic life and sexual freedom 
are opposed? Well, to take an extreme, let’s look at this quote from Pat 
Robertson, host of the Christian Right’s 700 Club. As he said in the 
Washington Post, August 23, 1993: “The feminist agenda is not about 
equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political 
movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their 
children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” 
While this is inadvertently comic, and easy and obvious a target though 
Robertson is, it should be noted that his particular brand of paranoia, 
in its fear of same-sex eroticism as a destroyer of hubby’s happy home, 
is one that’s shared, in a much more tamped-down style, by a lot of 
straight men and women, particularly if children are involved. On the 
other hand, one wonders what Robertson would make of Family Day in 
Provincetown, Massachusetts, where gay couples wheel baby carriages down 
Commercial Street amid a generally party-hearty atmosphere, and where, 
as far as one can tell, no knife-wielding, capitalist-hating, depraved 
lesbos are slitting their babies’ soft little throats and dancing to old 
Black Sabbath tracks at a witches’ coven. But I bring up these issues 
not to debate the merits of monogamy, patriarchy, or black magic, 
whether practiced by gays or straights, but to stress the depth of 
Gunn’s social and poetic commitments: as Keats would say, Gunn proved 
them “on his pulses”; and in his life and in his work he shows how 
pleasure and eroticism and domestic stability were, for him, a seamless 
continuum.

This is no common perception. As a matter of fact, when you survey 
literary tropes associated with love poetry in English going all the way 
back to Thomas Wyatt, it turns out to be a highly original one, at least 
as far as literature is concerned. Wrack my brains as I might, I can’t 
come up with a single straight writer of the twentieth century or, for 
that matter, any century who develops this trope such that all three of 
these qualities seem mutually entailing. When I mentioned this to an 
extremely well-read, female straight friend, she, too, was unable to 
come up with a single name; and though she did suggest Rumi, we both 
agreed that he fudged the issue by making the beloved synonymous with 
God. Several other names, Edna St. Vincent Millay, late Yeats, were 
quickly dismissed. And after a moment or two of silence, my friend 
said, “Actually, it’s kind of sad.” Sad that eroticism and pleasure and 
domestic stability are seen as antithetical, at least as a poetic 
convention for straight writers. And so it’s no exaggeration to say 
that Gunn’s development of this trope of seamless connection among 
eroticism, pleasure, and domestic stability is one of the deep sources 
of his originality.

As regards Gunn’s originality, I think my friend also meant that it was 
sad because of the limited repertoire of roles that straight people feel 
are available to them, as well as the constraint on feeling that these 
roles impose on the conventions of heterosexual love poems. I don’t for 
a moment think Gunn is advocating that heteros expand the range of 
those roles—he never expressed any sentiment about other people’s sexual 
desires, except to say, quite sensibly, that everyone should do whatever 
turns them on. Which is simply to say, again, that Gunn’s vision, his 
“community of the carnal heart,” is the vision of a poet and not a 
social reformer: it isn’t a poet’s duty to preach, or to do anything at 
all but write the poems that come his or her way. But it’s one of the 
inadvertent pleasures in reading Gunn to discover in his imagination a 
passion to propose new forms of human relation, at least as far as the 
straight world is concerned, through the practice of his art. This is 
what I mean when I say that Gunn’s vision is socially radical in its 
implications. It isn’t just Pat Robertson and his fear of slinky witches 
dancing around in the latest from Victoria’s Secret: it’s the conflicted 
and conflicting ways gay and straight conceive of their sexual freedoms 
and constraints when you compare Gunn’s version of community through 
sexual connection, and the typical conventions that surround 
heterosexual passion as it gets expressed through love poetry in English 
for the past five hundred years.

Gunn writes very movingly of the vicissitudes of his particular kind of 
domesticity in “The Hug,” a poem addressed to his longtime partner, Mike 
Kitay. In the poem, their “grand passion” has grown so familial that 
when he wakes to find his partner hugging him from behind, he says:

It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

The dryness of the embrace marks the transition from sexual to domestic 
love, from the physical joy of sex to the physical joy of being held by 
someone with whom a life has been shared. Now, what heterosexual male 
poet would celebrate such a transition? Presumably, that poet would say 
how sexual attraction was attendant on the hug; or else the poet would 
lament the passing of such passion. But Gunn does neither—or if there is 
a touch of melancholy, it is balanced by an equal sense of triumph. To 
make the point even clearer, and to ground it in the differences 
between Gunn’s version of domestic love and the hetero “tea for two” 
version, allow me once again to resort to biography. Bill Schuessler—a 
friend whom Gunn and Kitay met in 1967, the Summer of Love—moved in with 
them in 1971. According to Schuessler, “It was the happiest time in my 
life, really. It was a wonderful time to be alive in San Francisco. But 
it was more than that: I was wildly in love with Mickey [Kitay]. And 
Thom became almost like a father figure to me because he was always 
looking out for me. Which was incredibly strange—or nice—given that 
Mickey was his lover. It sounds like incest, but we all got along 
together.” The sexual mores that govern how we act out our carnal fates 
are obviously beyond the bounds of this essay, but how many straight 
households, how many Elizabeth Barretts and Robert Brownings, could 
adjust to the addition of a third wheel, with or without a night out at 
the Power Exchange, with or without a handy supply of mood-inducing drugs?

* * *

I remember the last time I visited Thom at his house on Cole Street. We 
talked for a long time about how the Haight had changed and was changing 
ever more rapidly into a well-to-do neighborhood, and about how he 
himself was changing, taking long naps, finding it difficult to write. 
And later, when we walked to get lunch, he told me little spicy stories 
about people whom he knew that certain houses or shops reminded him of, 
back in the day, before the neighborhood had gone upscale. He was 
dressed in a black sweatshirt that sported an image of Bluto (Popeye’s 
rival in the Popeye comic strip and cartoons), black motorcycle boots, 
black jeans, and an earring that gave him an air of piratical suavity 
and grace. He spoke about how the last time he’d been to a sex club, 
everybody had been speeding their brains out, and how it hadn’t been 
much fun. But he said it in such a way that you knew that this was all 
part of the adventure, part of his lifelong romance with experience that 
would end a few months later with him pronounced dead, according to the 
autopsy report, from “acute polysubstance abuse.” Whatever you make of 
his death, Thom was a true servant of eros. And in keeping with that 
devotion, his New Jerusalem was an open one in its generous conviction 
that the ecstatic could become a communal property, open to anyone, an 
apocalyptic city of carnal fulfillment and desire, in which his work 
will forever be one of the cornerstones.



This piece is excerpted from a longer essay, which will appear in its 
entirety in At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, edited by 
Joshua Weiner, published by the University of Chicago Press this summer.