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Fountainheads of Gay Culture By Perry Brass
Their influence on us is as prevalent and intertwining, through rarely overlapping, as the double helix strands that make up DNA. In fact, they are our DNA. As forbears to a perceivable culture, they are the great mysteries, monuments, and shadows of our lives. Both men had an early, almost instant understanding of themselves as larger than their material selves. They both came about at a time when the birthing of the world media was creating its own message, and the message that they created was that the individual could pull himself outside of his surrounding conformity and literally explode into stardom. Both Whitman and Wilde did this with a manic, almost biblical energy. In truth, both of them were devout followers (and scholars) of the self-creation revealed in various biblical texts. They understood very well the idea that seminal biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, David, and even Jesus came from mundane backgrounds, and after a moment of self-enlightenment declared themselves to be the "chosen of God." If later they became princes and kings, they did this through their own self-knowledge. What makes Whitman and Wilde cogent to us is that both of these men used this idea of "self-creation" to pull with it a homosexual imperative that could no longer be squashed below the surface. Other, for want of a better word, "man-loving" writers, such as the swashbuckling poet and aristocrat George Gordon, Lord Byron, (1788-1824), who could be seen in his pursuit of notoriety as a direct forbear of Wilde, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1849), who in his erotically-charged nature worship can be seen as a forbear of Whitman, could still successfully squash this homo-electric impulse in themselves and not bring it up, quivering and fresh, into the view of a knowledgeable public.
So in Wilde's case, the negation of passionate, homosexual feelings created a negative space for these feelings to crawl into. This negative space became what we call "camp," or, the "lie that tells the truth." Wilde did not come up with camp on his own; many popular music hall figures had been using camp innuendo all along. Also Symbolism, a movement that swept Europe in Wilde's time, produced a space for camp by exposing and accentuating various "deviancies" in society and making them a part of art. Therefore, even a hardened version of heterosexuality, the vamping, aggressive, "mannish" woman-in complete control of her heterosexuality-could fit into a homosexual space by exposing what was the "flip side" of "normalcy." This "vamp" was as aggressive as a man: this was obvious. But where was the man who, mysteriously, resisted the provocative woman, who was not interested in her, at least not sexually? His own "purity" could now be asserted, even burlesqued; the Wildean source proclaimed that what could not be said, could be alluded to with such razor sharp boundaries around it, that its absence became more threatening than its presence. Thus for decades, repressive English "queerness" had a stylish, aggressive snap to it that brought outsiders up to it, even into it, without ever being "obvious"; that is, saying exactly what it was. Wilde did not spawn, single-handedly, the mask of the "bon vivant bachelor," who, once he cast off the black tie, tails, and carnation, had a "repugnant" secret life; but, like Noel Coward (1889-1973) later, whose own Private Lives was so different from the one he showed us on the stage, he certainly adored and polished that mask and presented it as part of the comic narcissism of art. The mask itself became Wilde's artform, and it was this mask that he handed down to his own disciples, such as the "baroque" comic stylist Ronald Firbank (1886-1926), who in reality was a better writer than Wilde (and a greater genius), to Noel Coward, of course, to Marcel Proust (1861-1922), and a flock of "esthetes" with public personas who followed him. This now readily includes Quentin Crisp, Andy Warhol, and dozens of rampantly sexually ambiguous figures we see in pop media such as David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Madonna, Garth Brooks, or recently Allen Cummins. >From Wilde, we go directly into Glitter Rock and the Gender-fuck gay theatre of the 1970's that remains popular today. The cult of Wilde reinvents itself every several decades. At one point, he is witty, classy, utterly sophisticated, sharp and stinging. At another, he is tragic, haunting, shockingly naive, authentic, and spiritual. The fact that his ego willed his own defeat makes him either a martyr to our contemporary cult of authenticity, or the tragic clown whose death at the hands of a callous circus is too real. Like Joan of Arc who refused to put on the required clothes of a "maid" and so was burned as a witch, he could have saved himself easily, fled to France, and in another twenty years, during the Roaring Twenties, been the slightly wrinkled toast of every continent. As the countless publicity photos of him prove, Wilde was made for the movies and it is sad that he never made one. Like George Bernard Shaw, who loved hearing the sound of his own voice, he would have used every form of technology available to him. Technology itself would have been the perfect Wildean mask. Wilde grabbed his closeted predecessor Walter Pater's "Art for Art's Sake" philosophy (which said that a picture of a luscious naked man was just a picture of a hot naked man, not evidence of "immorality or buggery") and ran with it. When asked if his books had a moral, Wilde intoned, "There are only good books and bad books." He was the father of Pop Art, when "pop" was the bubbles that came out of a Champagne bottle, or the sound that a great star made when making her first appearance on the stage. Wilde loved gorgeous women-like Truman Capote, he had a following of fabulous goddesses who adored him.
Walt Whitman, as a self-declamatory poet and self-made celebrity, fascinated Wilde. Whitman proclaimed himself to be a "barbarian." He loved working-class men, Italian opera (which was then the fare of hard-working immigrants), and the sheer grubby, nitty-gritty urban sensuality of life; he was able to pull these things publicly into the sphere of art. Oscar Wilde, who was an attraction and star before he did anything star-worthy, came to America in the early 1880's on a lecture tour. What he lectured about was himself, as the personification of the "Aesthetic" movement, another code word for queerness popping its head up above the trenches. In 1882, Wilde made a special pilgrimage to Camden, New Jersey, to see the 63-year-old bearded Whitman. At this visit, the young star-to-be immediately recognized the subtext in the older poet's life: that Whitman had made, directly out of his own life, his art. This was to become Wilde's great dictum: that his life would be his "art." What he learned from this visit was that if you did manipulate your public image well enough, as Whitman had been able to do, and did not fall into any traps, as Wilde was not, you could become immensely . . . famous. Both men loved the idea of being physically available to their audiences: no shrinking violets they. The famous and rich American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) left an account of hearing Whitman read. She said, he "chanted his poetry, weaving up and down." He had a commanding, distinctive voice with all of New York in it. It was the New York of immigrant fathers, robust affectionate men, and the lads who worked on the docks and swam naked in the Hudson. Whitman took poetry out of the salon and brought it back into the sphere of worship, where "regular" people went. In our era of shopping mall Christian fundamentalism, we forget that the nineteenth century church in America was a bastion of freedom, of anti-slavery, of feminism. It stood up for child welfare and against the exploitation of women and children for greed. Whitman saw his calling to be deeply American, religious, spiritual. It was also revolutionary. Europe was the old, the ossified, the enslaving colonial powers. That aspect of the liberated and liberating gay soul, that seeks solidarity with the oppressed, that desires a genuine meaning in life, that calls for open liberation, is Whitman. Whitman is the font of genuine, unblushing, male connections; of the rich sexual sensuosity between men that he called "adhesiveness." He is "naturally" naked to Wilde's mask; but under this shocking nakedness, there is a mask, also. It is the mask of the "common" hero who, unshaved, in working-class jeans and leather vest, takes his own place on the stage. >From Whitman comes the American idea of the rock star who is the unvarnished "funky" truth in front of us. The British tabloids in the sixties ran headlines that asked, "Would You Want Your Daughter to Marry a Rolling Stone?" In the 1860s, they would have asked: "Would You Want Her to Marry Walt Whitman?" Whitman was the poet of the private man who adores his own appetites. He is nourished by what he hungers for, instead of ashamed of it. He feeds off his own secretive self. He asks us, "Do you know whose hand you're taking?" The answer is, this queer, hairy, sexy man who has located God in himself. Whitman's poetry came directly out of his readings of the Bible. He is both Abraham calling himself into being, and Jacob wrestling with his own forbidden, sexual self. Whitman adored America. He saw a depth in it that other writers like Henry James could not fathom. To Whitman, he was the forest and the frontier, and the ships in the New York harbor, and the live oaks in Louisiana mourning for others like them. Whitman was the direct forerunner of the Beats, of Allen Ginsberg, of pan sexuality, and, soon enough, of radical, open, contemporary gay liberation. Wilde was the martyred saint of those trembling in the closet, hoping to find one another- "feet in the gutter, eyes on the stars"; but Whitman was the father of the "real name." No masks, no pseudonyms, no Mattachines with secret passwords and furtive meetings. Those who wanted it all to hang out, were hanging out with Walt. Whitman had the stark richness of man, with a woman inside him. He had lost his mother early in life, and so had to mother himself. His presence as you read him becomes this rich serum, this blood and broth of human passions. Strangely enough, he did not "bomb" in England, Wilde's territory (though the French loved Wilde more than the English; and were crazy as well for Whitman), but hit it like a bomb. He was the New World "natural man" in hidebound Britain, something they desperately needed. The English "Uranian" writer and eccentric Edward Carpenter was almost his adopted son; John Addington Symmonds came to America to worship him. He begged Whitman to reveal to him that he was really a Uranian, too. Whitman would not. He knew he could not openly specify his appetites. He could not be the Good Gray Poet, the bard of all America, and the Good Gay (or Uranian) Poet as well. The most Whitmanesque of all English writers was D. H. Lawrence, who takes the term "closet queen" and blows it out of the closet. It is not a closet in his book, it's a battlefield. In his masterpiece, Women in Love, Lawrence begs that there be some "Whitman" between repressed men, some negotiating way, some unfettered, rich persona that they can crawl into and literally suck off. He is desperate for this, but it is not possible. The English could not go that far. E. M. Forster peered into Whitman, but could not grab him, not even in Maurice, the novel he would show no one. Whitman who had read William Blake with his Bible sees the body of man as God itself. He became the conduit for generations of queer men to find redemption. They could hold on to Oscar Wilde for a public face-a mask; but Whitman was their soul. Whitman was their secret lover, the opening at the closed bedroom door, the poet they waited to study in high school and later in college. Whitman was us, because he seemed to come from nothing itself. How did he get there? How did this not learned, not terribly literate, not educated man invent a genuine, "organic" approach to poetry and turn into both the national writer of America (our Shakespeare, our Cervantes), as well as a figure of international interest, whose presence, along with Poe, allowed unrhymed Symbolist poetry to flourish in France? He scorned academics. He published himself; even reviewed himself when he could get away with it. Wilde was a brilliant Oxford scholar, had the classics rammed up his whazoo, had studied with dons aplenty, and at one time thought that he would have a career teaching at a university. He wrote perfect Greek, had Greek erotica filtered through him, had gone, as a handsome youth, to Greece to "worship." Those people who thought Wilde was "self-invented" were in for a shock. He was not self-invented. He was self-promoted. But Whitman? Whitman was. He literally "came out" to himself. Great writers produce themselves while they are creating their work; they are enlarging themselves so that they can pull this thing of the imagination into themselves, into the smallness of what is, naturally, human. It is an amazing feat, and Whitman did it, bigger than almost anyone. You have to reach into Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton to reach into where Whitman was, in the fact that all of them had access to the naked language of themselves. This language is so "queer" that ordinary beings do not speak it; and conversely, it is so "ordinary" that anyone, queer or not, can use it. Whitman knew this, and that is why he would not admit to loving men. But he knew, instinctively, that men who loved men-really loved them-knew it: they knew that he was where they started. Wilde, insightful, smart, martyred, might have been where they finished; but Whitman was where they started. He is both humbling and nurturing, and we forget this, now that we are living in an age of brittle, starvation cynicism-an age that, as Wilde says, "Knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Whitman was our father, as Wilde was the magician who produced the magic act in which he, more than anyone, disappeared. We bring Wilde back again and again; and somewhere up there in that magnificent gay heaven that I know is real, he and Walt Whitman have finally met. And, as Ezra Pound said, have made peace with one another. Perry Brass has published twelve books. His latest novel is Warlock, A Novel of Possession, available through bookstores, Amazon.com, or 1-800 365-2401. He can be reached through his website, www.perrybrass.com. |
One of the originial "W"s: Oscar Wilde 
Walt Whitman 
© 1997-2002 BEI