During the height of the American AIDs epidemic, Thom Gunn poured his heart out into his poetry to construct a world of the raw, encapsulated in the refined. Gunn, an English born, queer identifying artist, relocated to San Francisco in 1954. His poetry is crafted with the usage of traditional form utilizing intentional meter, rhyme scheme, syllable count, and breaks in line or stanza. Gunn’s poems in The Man With Night Sweats is a collection regarding grief, homosexuality, intimacy, drug usage, and the AIDs crisis, one which evokes an image of a world constructed through dialectical metaphors presented through precision, prowess, and a perfectly measured syllabic tempo. Gunn’s poems convert the damned into the divine by describing gay relationships as heavenly, inherently Godly, and natural. The Man With Night Sweats discusses the irrevocably linked nature of opposites such as life and death, health and plague, love and lust, care and abandon, age and youth, drugs and innocence, sleep and waking, or the dead and the living. As Peter Barry writes in Beginning Theory, “for Saussure, language constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it. Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by the human mind, and constructed by and expressed through language, it is not already contained within the thing” (Barry, 42). Gunn constitutes a world through his poetry. The precision in his language constructs a capsule of his experiences as a gay man living in San Francisco during the AIDs crisis, but also constitutes a new world that, at the time, he experienced only through his poetry.
With poems like Philemon and Baucis or Odysseus on Hermes Gunn repeatedly equates his gay relationships and lovemaking with men to heaven and nature. As a result, his words construct a world in which gay men can be together in a way that is innate and accepted. By creating images in which gay men were compared with heaven and his suitors were described as pertaining to Godly divinity he battles the image of the gay man that was prevalent during the height of the AIDs crisis. Gay men, including many of Gunn’s students, friends, and lovers, were abandoned by governmental, medical, and religious institutions. Doctors were refusing to treat men if they were gay in fear of contamination, and HIV and AID’s was originally referred to as the “gay related immune deficiency.” Gunn refuses to accept this abandonment, and instead, creates a world in which divinity and queerness coexist peacefully in the same realm. He battles the concept that being gay is unnatural or a sin. He battles the concept that AIDs and HIV are diseases that are inherently exclusive to homosexuals. Through structuralist criticism, one may decode the varied concepts prevalent throughout Gunn’s poetry- a poem of just four lines may converse with dozens of realities. The power of each word, poem, line, title, chapter, and ultimately, the collection as a whole, are extended by the relational and signifying linkage between separate words, poems, or passages. As Ferdinand Saussure discusses in “Binary Oppositions'' the concepts conveyed through each poem “have value only through their opposition…some words are enriched through contact with others” (Saussure, 496).
In Philemon and Baucis, Gunn tenderly describes a physical and emotional connection between the mythical Greek couple that demonstrated hospitality toward Zeuss, and in turn, were saved from genocidal flood.
“Two trunks like bodies, bodies like twined trunks/ supported by their wooden hug. Leaves shine / In tender habit at the extremities. / Truly each other’s, they have embraced so long/ Their barks have met and wedded in one flow/ blanketing both/ Time lights the handsome bulk/ The gods were grateful, and for comfort given/ gave comfort multiplied a thousandfold” (Gunn, 12)
Although Philemon and Baucis are traditionally a heterosexual couple, “their wooden hug” is a signifier for Gunn’s poem The Hug, also included in The Man With Night Sweats. The Hug is about a moment during which Gunn embraced a male lover diagnosed with HIV in consolidarity. Utilizing a myth of a couple who housed a primarily male, but gender fluid God fabled to have had both male and female lovers, allows Gunn to present a reality in which a healthy heterosexual family cares for a divine queer male. It is possible that Philemon and Baucis were reimagined as gay by Gunn, but it is clear that the couple represents those who are saved from plague and disaster. With Philemon and Baucis, Gunn introduces the concept that true, longlasting, surviving love is an image he creates through the pairing of physical human intimacy and fluid or divine nature.
In Odysseus on Hermes, Gunn details an attraction to a younger man. He writes,
“I was seduced by innocence/-beard scarcely visible on his chin- by the god within. -/ the incompletion of youth / like the new limb of the cactus growing/ -soft-green-not fully formed/ the spines still soft and living, / potent in potential, / in process and so / still open to the god/ When complete and settled / then closed to the god. / So sensing it in him / I was seduced by the god, / becoming in my thick maturity/ suddenly unssettled/ un-solid/ still being formed- / in the vulnerability, edges flowing, / myself open to the god. / I took his drug / and all came out right in the story. / Still thinking back / I seek to renew that power / so easily got / seek to find again that knack/ of opening my settled features, / creased on themselves, / to the astonishing kiss and gift/ of the wily god to the wily man.” (Gunn, 13).
Here, Gunn’s poem equates purity to a younger lover, a lover who is a god. Gunn’s line “I was seduced by the god… I took his drug” challenges Christian, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish religious constructs that being gay, or having gay intercourse, is a sin, one frowned upon by God (Gunn, 13). Instead, he creates a world in which being gay is encouraged and even participated in by God or gods. In this relation, equating something that was so openly protested and oppressed by institutional systems like the government or public and private medical organizations, and heavily lacking religious aid, Gunn escapes earthly limitation and places queer identifying men in heaven. His poetry constitutes the world of the divine homosexual by utilizing the same natural eden-esque imagery to refer to both the heterosexual (or sexually fluid) relationship(s) seen in Philemon and Baucis with the queer relationship described in Odysseus on Hermes. Hermes is described as representing “the incompletion of youth / like the new limb of the cactus growing/ -soft-green-not fully formed/ the spines still soft and living,” which paints the gay man as a natural entity (Gunn, 13).
In Roland Barthes’s The Structuralist Activity, he states “We can in fact presume that there exist certain writers, painters, musicians, in whose eyes a certain exercise of structure represents a distinctive experience...in other words, by the way in which he mentally experiences structure” (Barthes, 871). Gunn constructs a world with his structured poetry, potent with signification, opposition, relational extensions, and linear continuations. Gunn’s poetic world is one that explores the heavenly nature of the homosexual and sheds light upon the carnal plagued nature of man. Gunn creates a collection of memories and writes of an experience that heterosexual-ruled America had “kept their eyes studiously turned away/ from” (Gunn, 48). Gunn presents his experiences and observations regarding the homosexual identity during a pandemic, thus, constituting a memorial and an elegy to an identity that was ignored. He creates a world through his writing in which the homosexual is accepted without controversy. By referring to gay men as heavenly, he challenges institutional homophobia and poses the question- can the gay men he loved only experience peace from physical ailment and systematic abuse in death? Gunn’s creation of the divine homosexual is one that exists as a binary opposition, one that is simultaneously a hopeful ode to heavenly, natural sexualty and an elegy mourning the absence of treatment, acceptance, and ability to exist as an outwardly gay man in HIV-ridden 20th century San Francisco.
Bibliography
Gunn, Thom. The Man With Night Sweats, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory, Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.
Barthes, Roland. “The Structuralist Activity.” The Critical Tradition, by David Richter, 3rd ed., Bedford Books, 1989, pp. 871-874.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Nature of the Linguistic Sign.” The Critical Tradition, by David Richter, 3rd ed., Bedford Books, 1989, pp. 492-502.