Additions to An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry (2002)
with an essay on searching Worldcat and the internet.
Reproduced here by
special permission of the copyright owner Paul Knobel
Below are listed works on gay male poetry which have come to my attention from the publication of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and its Reception History in 2002. Detailed notes on searching Worldcat, the international union catalog where many items have been found, are included to help future researchers. These notes on searching also have general applicability in searching library catalogs in general and the internet.
Published works by myself
First and most importantly is the 2009 edition of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry of all the material in the 2002 first edition. This was published in a single pdf file with all 6,300 entries arranged alphabetically in a single sequence. This work comes to 2,900 pages in 12 point Times Roman and was published on a cdrom. The edition also includes in a pdf file A World Overview of Male Homosexual Poetry (first printed on paper as a traditional book in 2005) with an introduction; this is the work first published in 2005 listed below with a reedited introduction created in 2009. (The language overviews are also in the complete Encyclopedia text on the same cdrom as the 2009 alphabetical sequence where they are however harder to locate.) This work is available at email address pkno2250 [at] gmail.com for $40 Australian posted to an address in Australia and $45 outside the country for postage to other countries (prices subject to change in future years). The work includes the social, legal and historical background to the poetry. The 2002 ediiton was very favorabaly reviewed in ISAA Review (refereed journal of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia) vol 2. no. 5 (2003), 51–52; it is cited by Dr Diederik Janssen in his bibliography The Men’s Directory (2008) available as a free download on the internet. In compiling the work I systematically covered the world and no work known on homosexuality has such a world coverage.
A World Overview of Male Homosexual Poetry (Washington DC: Forest Press, 2005). Edition of 49 copies. This has an Introduction, list of Works Cited and Index of languages and language group overviews. This work consists of the 83 language and language groups extracted from the Encyclopedia and put together in alphabetical order of language so readers can get a quick overview of the whole encyclopedia (asterisks (*) before words indicate entries). A second edition of the World Overview was completed in 2009 and made available for the internet site of Erwin Haeberle; the main difference is the rewriting of the introduction.
A future planned work.
On the advice of Wayne Dynes, I have decided to include the texts of poets who are out of copyright (initially only English works) and of poets in copyright who give permission for me to use their works. It is planned to have the texts of works by some 200 English language poets. A future edition could be multi lingual with many poets in non English languages as well as English. Many texts of such poets are available on the internet and more will appear as works are scanned in and posted on the internet (eg in Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive).
Searching library catalogs for gay poetry
The advent in 2006 of Worldcat, a world union catalog in a public form available on the Internet, is a landmark in library use. Worldcat, emanating from the United States has been put together by the joining of OCLC and RLIN. It presently has over 90 million records from 71,00 libraries in 112 countries (see the Wikipedia entry), covering material in 360 languages. New libraries and entries are constantly being added though eventually libraries covered must stabilize. Worldcat makes available an increasing volume of works in many formats (see the column to the left of found works in any search for tabulated totals books, articles etc). That articles are included is an added bonus and makes Worldcat a first stop shop. A keyword search for “homosexuality” in 9 November 2009 yielded 53,200 items with material in the categories Articles, Books, Internet resources, Visual material and Journal/ Magazine/ Newspaper and more categories).
The fact that hundreds of major research libraries in many countries are on Worldcat means that new works can be found very quickly after publication, especially with CIP—Cataloging in publication. CIP cataloging is a cataloging record which is created before a work is published. In 2002 there was a lag in cataloguing of sometimes up to 3 years for researchers to find out about new works. With Worldcat, this has now been cut to months and, if the work has CIP cataloging, a work can be known before it is published.
For individual libraries the Library of Congress catalog yielded 4,510 works for a keyword search for homosexuality on 7 November 2009 while Harvard University Library yielded 4, 892 works on the same date. (These totals are substantially up on prior years: in 2002 such a search of the Library of Congress catalog yielded just over 3000 works.) I used Harvard Library in June 2009 for research on homosexuality and found it superior to any library ever used. For a start books are brought to readers and over 99% could be found (whereas at the Library of Congress in the past over 20 years usage up to 30-40% of items in the catalog could not be located and searches take up to one month). The library also has a very wide linguistic coverage. These 2 major research libraries’ catalogs have works of major importance and are worth checking separately since many listings on Worldcat have multiple records.
The Library of Congress (which, under copyright provisions, still probably does a substantial portion of the cataloguing for United States published books) has included non roman scripts from 2006 and so they appear on Worldcat. In short, you can search Worldcat and major research libraries using Chinese characters or the Arabic script.
See also Thomas Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research, third edition (Oxford, 2005) for ways of searching. The author, a senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress, states that you should always assume the work you want to find exists. Simply type in any library catalog or a database or on the internet as keywords the words which would be in the work you assume exists or the area of knowledge you are checking. This is a crucial piece of advice in proceeding with library catalog searches or those on any database or the internet: always make the assumption that the work or information exists.
Worldcat also has an advanced search capacity where, for instance, keywords can be limited to subject searches which make searches narrower; the negative aspect is that not all gay works have subject cataloging. Other words such as “gay” and “queer” may also be used. See also the discussion of subject cataloguing below for more specific ways of finding gay male poetry.
World gay culture
We are now, with the internet, which increases in power and scope amazingly each year, in an era of world culture. People in small third world villages will soon receive the internet on mobile phones; some no doubt even now do.
For the gay world that means world gay culture. I believe that local variants need to be nourished and don’t want a dull uniformity everywhere but gay rights are human rights and the right to sexuality is one of the most basic rights. When I reviewed Robert Aldrich’s Gay Life and Culture: a world history (New York, 2006), I found that the book was not a world gay history but largely a European one (see my review translated into Swedish in Lambda Nordica volume 12 number 3, 2007) . This led me to consider ways of writing a world gay history. One way is by country with each country having one page in the work, with a readable work being about 200 pages since this is the number of countries in the world (the exact number of countries is unknown because of different ways of defining a country and fluctuates from time to time eg Timor l’este or East Timor is a recent new country). I then decided that some countries (eg Ethiopia) could probably only yield a few lines at this stage of knowledge, while countries with large visible gay movements (eg France, the United States, Japan) would need 3 pages. However the length of the book at about 200 pages would remain the same.
In the course of preliminary research I did keyword searches on Worldcat for “homosexuality” (a Library of Congress subject term) and the various countries eg “homosexuality” and “Nigeria”, “homosexuality” and “China” and so on. These searches revealed some poetry items, mainly gay poetry anthologies. These country searches have applicability for finding information on gay books relating to a particular culture (many cultures correspond with countries eg France largely corresponds with French culture, Russia with Russian). They are another way of locating relevant works. Searchers can also search by a language and “homosexuality” eg “French”, “Russian” and so on, especially as library records usually have a language field. National library catalogs should also be searched for a particular country or language.
There are now massive diasporas of people who live in other countries apart from those in which they wer born eg many Indians from India in such countries as Australia, the United States and Great Britain and similary with Chinese from China. This is another factor making for a world gay culture. The dvd Queer China, Comrade China released in China in 2009 with interviews on homosexuality with some 30 gay activists and scholars shows the influence of western culture on Chinese culture (notably the queer approach but also the general push for gay rights). In India the decriminalisation of male male sexual acts on 2 July 2009 marks a giant step forward. Bombay Dost (from 1990), at present India’s only gay magazine has been revived from 2002 after a hiatus of a few years and is now visually thrilling. In Singapore where male homosexual acts are still illegal (as they are in Malaysia and other Muslim countries) the gay community has used the internet to communicate brilliantly.
What are the main languages in which works on homosexuality have been published, apart from English? A check of Worldcat for works in non English languages on homosexuality using subject keyword “homosexuality” and searching 39 languages 15-22 June 2009 produced over 4,600 works. Records totalling 4,621 were as follows by language: Afrikaans 26, Arabic 29, Catalan 14, Chinese 308, Croatian 4, Czech 30, Danish 50, Dutch 237, Finnish 16, French 1029, German 1044, Greek, ancient 1, Greek, modern 32, Hebrew 80, Hindi 2, Hungarian 12, Icelandic 1, Indonesian (so called in Worldcat, but known in Indonesia, the world's fifth most populous country as Bahasa Indonesia, "the Indonesian language") 24, French 1029, Italian 192, Japanese 206, Korean 23, Latin 2, Latvian 1, Lithuanian 2, Malay 3, Malayalam 1, Maori 1, Norwegian 38, Persian 2, Polish 36, Portuguese 221, Romanian 1, Russian 50, Spanish 751, Swedish 102, Thai 11, Turkish 36 and Urdu 3. The top 10 languages in descending order of records were: German 1044 records, French 1029, Spanish 751, Chinese 318, Dutch 237, Portuguese 221, Japanese 206, Italian 192, Swedish 102 and Hebrew with 80 records. This work is to be published on Erwin Haeberle’s web site as Bibliography of homosexuality: non-English sources. I used the “Limit Results to: Language” box in Advanced Search making the checks in the preceding paragraph.
A simple keyword search of Worldcat on 9 November 2009 produced 53,200 records as already noted. Readers should remember that such searches will always produce many more records than a keyword subject search (which is done on Worldcat using Advanced Search).
The works of many gay poets such as Rumi, Whitman and Harold Norse seem made for world gay culture; even the words of Jesus Christ, the probable gay founder of Christianity, some of which are in poetry, are world words. Christ famously said “Love one another as I have loved you” (Gospel of John, chapter 13, verses 34–35). W. H. Auden the great British gay poet and a Christian believer said in his poem September 1, 1939, the date of the beginning of the Second World War, “We must love one another or die”. This is why we read great gay poetry: it has something powerful to say. Walt Whitman spoke of “The institution of the dear love of comrades” in his poem from the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, “I hear it was charged against me”. These 2 poems are on the internet
There are now many and increasing databases. LGBT Life with full text is one such; it also includes material in non English languages. PMLA Online is a bibliography put out by the Modern Language Association which is excellent for modern languages. For ancient Greek and Latin see L’année philologique (which is now capable of searching the periodical from 1924). Searches of such works increasingly yield amazing items, especially in periodicals. Australian literature has a database devoted to it called Austlit. Many major periodicals (eg the Journal of Homosexuality) are also indexed in Worldcat. Academic Search Premier is a good general academic database.
The internet should always be searched for any topic. Use advanced Google for searches in non English languages (at present some 45 but sure to expand greatly in the future). Use the appropriate word for the language (locatable from a language dictionary on the internet) eg “poesie” and “homosexualité” for French.
See the sites of Rictor Norton and Paul Halsall (his People with a History) in English and that of Giovanni dall’Orto, Italy’s greatest gay scholar, for outstanding coverage of things gay in Italy. Erwin Haeberle in Berlin has sexological material in 8 languages on his site. China has a huge gay site called Ai Bai (all the Chinese entries from An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry have been placed on Ai Bai with my permission). There is much material in the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia (eg many articles on gay poets such as James Kirkup, Harold Norse and Jonathan Williams to give three examples). This material is put up by users of the internet but has been found to be surprisingly accurate. There are versions of Wikipedia in non-English languages also. In Wikipedia, “Homoerotic poetry” which I originally wrote, is a brief introduction to gay poetry, though it was originally titled “Male homosexual poetry”
Searching using Library of Congress subject cataloguing.
A Library of Congress subject term which is useful in finding gay poetry is: “Homosexuality—Poetry”. 322 items came up on 6 November 2009. Amongst the items are many books of poems by poets in the Encyclopedia which were not known to me. There are a some new poets.
Keyword searches for “homosexuality” and “poetry” are also profitable (607 items came up using “homosexuality’ and “poetry” as keywords on Worldcat on 6 November 2009). “Gay Men—Poetry” is more general but produced 528 items. “Gays’ writings”, “Homosexuality and literature” and “Homosexuality in literature” are useful but less specific. Only what I consider important works are listed below. The subject term “Gay Men—Poetry” produced some anthologies.
The works below are in 6 sections. The dramatic growth of the internet and of internet available library catalogs marks the period 2002–09 so more and more information has become available on poets.
Since 2002 there has been a generation change in gay poets. Many of the major poets of gay liberation have died and in most cases collected works have been published.
Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947–1997 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008) includes the poems of his last volume (not included in his first Collected Poems); the work has 1191 pages and an Index of titles, first lines, and original book sources. Ginsberg is one of the most important gay poets of the last half century.
Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: the somewhat private life of Allen Ginsberg (New York: Viking, 2006), 702 pages with index and illustrations. The life of Ginsberg by his bibliographer. Ginsberg had a peaceful death in April 1997. Some 3,000 people in his address book were contacted and many visited him before he died. His personal effects, including art objects, were sold at auction by Sotheby’s on 7 october 1999. His manuscript collection and archive (including 88,000 photograph images and 154 films and videos) was sold to Stanford University library prior to his death provide for the upkeep of his partner Peter Orlovsky after Ginsberg’s death.
Christopher Hennessy, Outside the lines: talking with contemporary gay poets (Ann Arbor: University of Michingan Press, 2005), 216 pages. Books mentioned (by poet arranged alphabetically) pp. 212-13. Looking to the future: a bibliography of emerging gay poets pp. 215–16 (none of the names listed are known to me). The poets interviewed are Frank Bidart, Alfred Corn, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Timothy Liu, J. D. McClatchy, Carl Phillips, D. A. Powell, Reginald Shepherd and David Trinidad.
The Canadian gay poet Ian Young continues to update his bio-bibliography. A copy may be obtained through his Ian Young Books site. He has completed a third edition of his The Male Homosexual in Literature with additional items added to 1982 which is the year that Aids surfaced as a problem and the date of publication of the second edition. This work (which only covers additional material to 1982) hopefully will be published soon on the internet.
Before he died in 2008, Jonathan Williams published his selected poems Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), 304 pages. This selection was chosen by Jim Cory but does not include perhaps his finest gay poem (April 19) Lexington Nocturne (New York, 1993) about sex with a hustler. Material from Williams in 713 cartons is in the Poetry Collection of the New York State Library at Buffalo in upstate New York under the title Jargon Society (which Williams founded); it awaits detailed investigation. See also Cory’s interview with Jonathan Williams in the James White Review in 1994 and his memorial to Williams in the May 2008 issue of the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide.
The death in 2005 of Guy Davenport, translator and critic as well as poet, resulted in his collection going to the Humanities Research Center in Houston. This collection included his art collection with many homoerotic works. See his Wikipedia entry for further information and his New York Times obituary.
The death of Harold Norse on 8 June 2009 was also a great loss to gay poetry. He saw his collected poems through the press before he passed on: In the hub of the fiery force: collected poems 1934–2003 (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2003), 620 pages. His long poem “Homo” is one masterpiece.
The British poet James Kirkup died on 10 May 2009 after retiring in the early 1990s to live in the country of Andorra (near the Spanish border with France), after a long residence in Japan. See obituaries on the internet. The University of Salzburg published several volumes of his poems in the last years of his life. Kirkup’s books from Japan were all published in small editions and are virtually unobtainable. He wrote obituaries for The Independent until 2008 and a collection of his work is in the South Shields library in Great Britain. Obituaries are on the internet.
Thom Gunn, whose work is excellent at its best but very uneven and who wrote a handful of memorable poems about Aids, died in 2004; see his Wikipedia entry.
James Merrill’s Collected Poems appeared in 2001 and his Collected Prose in 2004. A Selected Poems appeared in 2008.
Jack Spicer’s collected poetry my vocabulary did this to me was published in 2008 (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan Press), 472 pages, with an introduction by the editors Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian.
John Ashbery’s Collected Poems (1956–87)appeared in 2008 in the Library of America series to excellent reviews (eg in the New York Review of Books in 2009). Much of his poetry is difficult and not immediately gay. He is now 82.
are of great importance since they give voice to new poets and also give the
flavour of gay poetry of any particular time. I have been pleasantly surprised
to see the continuance of them and the large number found in Spanish.
by Hoshang Merchant
(New Delhi and Milton Park: Routledge, 2009), 270 pages
by Steven Reigns ; Jenny Walters ; Dorothy Allison ;
(Los Angeles: Grendier Press, 2008), 153 pages
by Lawrence Schimel ;
(New York: A Misummer Night's Press ; Maple Shade, NJ : Lethe Press, 2008), 144 pages.
This is promised to be an annual work. There is a good choice of poems.
edited by Maurice Tracy
(Charleston, IL: Eastern Illinois University, 2007), 58 pages
Queer poetry from Eastern Illinois University.
by John Barton ; Billeh Nickerson ;
(Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 368 pages
A very comprehensive sampling of Canadian gay poetry which however does not do justice to the work of Ian Young, who with E. A. Lacey, is the major poet from Canada of gay lib.
by Jim Elledge ;
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 306 pages
The period covered for United States gay poetry in this anthology has not been previously anthologized.
The Eternal Flame: a world anthology of homosexual verse (2000 B.C.-2000 A.D.), volume 2
edited and with translations by Anthony Reid (No place: Aspodel, 2002), 578 pages
The second and concluding volume of an anthology wich took over 40 years to compile and is unquestionably the most wideranging gay poetry anthology ever published, with the 2 volumes coming to 1058 pages. The anthology, with 600 poets and some 1500 poems, is also the largest gay poetry anthology ever compiled by a huge margin. The translations are by the editor. The author, an Englishman, died of cancer shortly after the publication of volume 2; he was married to a woman and had one son, but was actively gay for much of his life. Much of his gay library, which included early gay underground photographs from the nineteenth century, was seized by the British police in the late 1990s. Volume 1 was published in 1992 in Amsterdam with the publishing imprint New York: Dyanthus Press and is 480 pages long. There are 3 sections: Greece, Italy (including poems from Latin and Italian), and Islam (Arabs, Moors, Persians and Turks); Index of writers pp. 473-78. The translations of Islamic poets are from French and Spanish translations and not direct from Arabic and Persian. Volume 1 included the first readable translation in English of the Mousa paidike of Straton (acive 117–131, during the time of the gay Roman Emperor, Hardian), the first surviving ancient Greek gay poetry anthology (though it was preceded by many such works some of which appear to be incorporated in it). (Another readable translation of STraton’s anthology done by Daryl Hine, Puerilities: erotic epigrams from the Greek anthology, appeared in 2001 and was not included in my poetry encyclopedia.) Volume 2 was cited in manuscript in the 2002 edition of my Encyclopedia but, since the photostat was camera ready copy, the citations can be read as referring to the published second volume. This second volume of the work is divided into the following sections: Britain (1550–1590), Britain (Modern), Germany, The Netherlands, Spain (Spain, Portugal, Spanish South America, The Caribbean), Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden), Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Roumania), The Near East (Sumeria, The Bible Lands, Ancient Egypt), The Far East (China, Japan) and America; Contents pp. 7–8; Index of poets pp. 563–71 The publisher of volume 2 was actually Elysium Books in upstate New York State; they published the work in return for being given gay books by Anthony Reid. Anthony Reid published many translations of the Swedish gay poet Nils Hallbeck (1907–1997), whom he regarded as one of the finest gay poets ever, and completed a biography of Hallbeck and biographies of Martial and Cavafy before he died. He was adamant that the title of The Eternal Flame, though cumbersome, would not be changed. It refers to the continuity of homosexuality over 4,000 years as shown in gay poetry and is a direct attack on the social constructionist view that homosexuality only emerged with the word “homosexual” in 1859. Even in 2009 there are very few copies of The Eternal Flame, volume 2 (2002), in research libraries.
by Wilbur D Nesbit ; Henry Stevenson ; E E Bradford ;
(S.l. : Twisted Palms Press, 1998), 25 pages.
A selection of the work of 3 Uranian poets.
Cuori smascherati: antologia di poesia gay e lesbica
edited by Gianluca Polastri
(Torino: Ananke and Fondazione Sandro Penna, 2006), 157 pages, illustrated
edited by Nicola Gardini
(Milano: Crocetti, 2001), 191 pages
This appears from the cataloging description to be a translation into Italian of twentieth century poems from other languages.
edited by Hugo Guimarães
(São Paulo: Annablume, 2008), 103 pages illustrated.
This is only the second known Portuguese anthology of gay poems, the first being the 1969 work published in Brasilia and on the decadent model, Poemas do amor maldito.
edited by Adolfo de Teleny ; et al
(Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Literatura Gris, 2007), 99 pages.
Works by 4 gay poets from Argentina: Adolfo de Teleny, Néstor Latrónico, Miguel Ángel Lens and Ugo Rodino.
edited by Arnulfo Vigil ; Ernesto Castillo ;
(Monterrey, N.L., Mexico : Oficio, 2006),
edited by Luis Antonio de Villena ;
(Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2002), 446 pages
ed., selección y pról. de Luis Antonio de Villena”: that is edited, selected and with an introduction by Luis Antonio de Villena.
The third known Spanish gay poetry anthology.
edited by Víctor Manuel Mendiola ;
(México, D.F.: Plaza & Janés, 2001), 257 pages. A note attached states: “A selection of 20th century poems on gay themes by Mexican and Spanish and Spanish American poets who lived in Mexico.”
This is the second known Spanish gay poetry anthology, the first being the 299 page 1997 work from Mexico Primera antología de la poesia homosexual: los arquetipos orals de veneno, fango, punción, mutilición, y devoración.
Sodomy is not enough! : ribald rhymes &
by Jeffery Beam
(Brooklyn, NY : White Crane Books, 2008).
by R George-Murray
(Oaxaca : R. George-Murray, 2000)
Murray has published many small chapbooks.
by Jim Kepner
(Los Angeles: J Kepner, 1996)
Poems by one of the founders of the IGLA Archives in Los Angeles.
by Tucson Gay Coalition.;
(Tucson: Tucson Gay Coalition, [1977?])
by Clive Murphy
(London : Brick Lane, 2008).
by Paul Knobel
(New York: the author 2009)
Poem card about gay persecution; one page. Ian Young is the first known gay publisher of poem cards.
Entries here are samples of works which may be found.
García Lorca, Federico, 1898-1936. Antología de la poesía homosexual y cósmica de Federico García Lorca / prólogo y análisis arquetípico de Fredo Arias de la Canal (México : Frente de Afirmación Hispanista, 2001), 350 pages
Pardo García, Germán, 1902- Antología del soneto tanático, homosexual y cósmico / de Germán Pardo García ; prólogo y analisis arquetípico de Fredo Arias de la Canal. (México : Frente de Afirmación Hispanista, 2002), 134 pages
Criticism is listed by language with English first. After consulting Worldcat and seeing the results for periodical articles, for more articles consult databases such as LGBT Life with full text and PMLA online as well as more general works such as Academic Search Premier. For particular languages consult datbases relating to those language eg for ancient Greek and Latin L’année philologique. For Australian literature see Austlit. Only sample articles are included here.
by Hal Fischer
Thesis/dissertation : Manuscript Archival Material
(Los Angeles, CA : J. Kepner, 1996)
W. Holland, “The calamus root: a study of American gay poetry since World War II” Journal of Homosexuality volume 34, numbers 3-4, 5-25.
This study traces the development of gay poetry after World War 2. It is written by a poet Walter Holland, who is the author of Journal of a Plague Year: poems 1979–1992 (1992), fine poems on Aids who has an entry in the 2002 Encyclopedia. A very important concise study. I am grateful to Ian Young for drawing it to my attention.
by Sarah K Howison
Honors paper of 2007, 72 pages.
Manuscript Archival Material
The Worldcat record gives no further details.
Donny Smith, Gay poetry anthology index
(United States: Geocities, 2001). An ebook
Periodicals such as the James White Review and the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide continue. The James White Review, the United States’ oldest lesbian and gay literary review, publishes gay poetry and book reviews to a much greater extent than the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review which also publishes poetry.
Non- English languages
To locate names of gay periodicals in non English languages apart from Worldcat, check the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives list available on the internet titled Our Own Voices: A Directory of Lesbian and Gay Archives, 1890s to 2000s. New periodicals first published in the last 10 years may not be on Our Own Voices.
by M Beasley
Articls in Text and Performance Quarterly, 28, no. 4, (2008): 433-457
“This essay explores the ritual performance of the “Tribute to the Ancestors.” Specifically this ethnographic essay situates the “Tribute to the Ancestors,” a ritual of death and loss by a community of same-gender-loving men of African descent, as an experimental practice that reveal both transformative powers and social tensions in contemporary society relating to the black gay male body.”
An article on gay Armenian poems written by Yegische Charents has been written by the Harvard professor of Armenian James Russell, following publication of the gay poems in Inknagir magazine. A gay movement is emerging in Armenia following years of persecution of gays.
by Matteo B Bianchi ; Stefano Bolognini ; Daniela Danna ; Francesco Gnerre ; Giandomenico Turchi ; Patrick Absalon ; Philippe Clermont ; Christophe Comentale ; Jean-Claude Féray ; Samuel Minne ; Vincent Simonet ; Amal Bedjaoui ; Société des amis d'Axieros (Paris)
(Paris : Société des amis d'Axieros (45 avenue Reille), 2004), 330 pages.
A selection of works published by the friends of Axieros, a French gay poet, who is not to be confused with Augiéras (see next entry).
Serge Sanchez, François Augiéras: Le dernier primitif
(Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2006), 461 pages
Biography of François Augiéros who had a love affair with his uncle and has become a cult figure in France. Other works on him have been published.
Timothy McGovern, “Expressing Desire, Expressing Death: Anton Lopo's Pronomes and Queer Galician Poetry”, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, volume 7, number 2 (2006), 135-153
Available from ArticleFirst. Found on Worldcat.
A gay periodical in Georgion has appeared which is held by Harvard University library. It is not known whether this periodical publishes poetry.
The periodical Forum: Homosexualität und Literatur continues and has excellent reviews and articles of German books, some relating to gay poetry.
See the internet site of Giovanni dall’ Orto which is one of the largest gay internet sites and the best in Italian which has been greatly expanded in recent years.
The poet Giam Battista Marino wrote poems based on the homosexual Caravaggio’s strongly homoerotic paintings: see “Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio”, Metropolitan Museum Journal volume 26 (1991). Available from JSTOR on the internet.
See on the internet “Russian Gay Literature”, a text prepared for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality which was never published. There are gay literary magazines in Russia which publish gay poetry: for titles see the catalog of Harvard University Library which has the best collection of current gay periodicals of any United States library.
Nicholas Balutet, Ars homoerótica : escribir la homosexualidad en las letras hispanicas
(Paris: Publibook, 2006), 89 pages
Booklength study of Spanish gay writing in Spanish which consists of s series of articles, only some of which deal with relevant authors.
The Buenos Aires periodical NX: periodismo gay para todos (from 1994) has become the defacto gay periodical of South America’s Spanish Speaking nations but is fairly lightweight.
Encyclopedias with entries on gay male poetry or poets
lgbtq (Internet encyclopedia): see entry “Poetry: Gay Male” by Greogory Woods (created in 2002) with bibliography and cross referencing to entries on poets.
The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (2 volumes (New York: Garland, 1990), edited by Wayne Dynes is now on the internet on the site of William A Percy and will soon be on the site of Erwin Haeberle in Berlin.
Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, editors, Africana: the encyclopedia of the African and African American experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999). See the article on homosexuality. The editor Kwame Appiah is openly gay and is a philosopher who works ar Princeton University.
Timothy F. Murphy, A readers guide to gay and lesbian studies (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000). Contains articles on many gay writers, including some poets.
Ehsan Yarshater, “Homosexuality” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (volume 12, fascicle 5, New York: Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 2004). This seminal article is by the editor.
The release of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004 made available a superb reference tool for biographical information on British persons. For instance, see the entry on Sir Maurice Bowra, a selection of whose zany homosexual verse appeared in the collection of his writings titled New Bats in Old Belfries edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (Oxford: Robert Dugdale), a title which echoes a 1946 volume of gay poet John Betjeman. A new biography on Maurice Bowra appeared in 2009 by Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A life. The biography makes clear that Bowra, who fought in the first World War saw the values of ancient Greek civilization as being of great value in the twentieth century world (and now beyond) (this is of course a view that comes from such earlier scholars as John Addington Symonds and in German Benedict Friedländler’s Renaissance des Eros Uranios (1908; repr. 1975)).
Didier Eribon, Dictionnaire des cultures gays et lesbiennes (Paris: Larousse, 2003) (in French)
Bern-Ulrich Hergemöller, editor, Mann für Mann: biographisches Lexikon zur geschichte von Freundesliebe und mannmännlicher Sexualität iim deutschen Sprachraum
First published in Hamburg in 1998, now in a second edition with additional material (Hamburg; Suhrkamp, 2001) (in German). Very comprehensive gay German biographical dictionary
Mira, Alberto, Para entendernos: diccionario de cultura homosexual, gay e lésbica (Barcelona: Tempestad, 1999) (in Spanish)
From 2000 there has been a marked increase in the writing of gay histories in many languages. These works include histories of countries and of large cities. Only works of major importance are included. These works are mainly relevant for giving the gay historical background of various countries and Europe in those from Europe west of the Urals; poetry is usually only sparsely referenced. See Subject searching above for ways of searching using subjects. “Homosexuality”, “history” and either a language (“Russian”) or a country (“Russia”) of either Worldcat or the internet will yield material. Also use Advanced Google and the relevant language and words in that language for “homosexuality” and “history”.
Robert Aldrich, editor, Gay life and culture: a world history (New York: Universe, 2006)
This work, which has been translated into several languages, despite its title consists of a series of essays mainly on Europe. Very few poets are mentioned and then only briefly; no poetry is quoted.
Zhaizhou Zhang Zhaizhou (pseudonym of Zhang Jie, a librarian at the old books library of the National Library of Beijing), Ai mei de li cheng (Zhengzhou Shi : Zhongzhou gu ji chu ban shi, 2001.
ISBN 7534818915 9787534818912
A scholarly and comprehensive history of homosexuality based on at least 3 prior histories all cited in the 2002 edition of my Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry.
Liu Dalin, Tong xing lian xing shi (Taibei Shi : Bai shi ke ji yi shu gu fen you xian gong si, 2005)
ISBN 9867224132 9789867224132
History of homosexuality in China and elsewhere by China’s leading sexologist.
148 items appeared on Worldcat on 9 November 2009 for a keyword search: homosexuality China history
Jiri Fanel, Gay Historie (Praha: Dauphin, 2000). This is a work in Czech which is over 500 pages and is an attampt at a comprehensive gay history but mainly deals with Europe. Rare: copy cited, Library of Congress.
Crompton, Louis, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Belnak Press, 2004)
Epic in scope this work yet only touches the surface and especially in relation to poetry.
Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidai, Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History
New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000)
A large number of articles of which a few deal with gay poetry. 370 pages.
L. S. Klein, Drugaia liubov (Sankt-Peterburg: Folio Press, 2000)
A general gay history of 860 pages with illustrations and bibliography (in Russian). ISBN 762701468
L. S. Klein, Drugaia storona svetila (Sankt-Peterburg : Folio-Press, 2002)
Discusses a number of famous Russian gays with chapters on each. 653 pages
Osvaldo Bazan, Historia de la homosexualidad en la Argentina : de la conquista de América al siglo XXI,
(Buenos Aides: Marea, 2004)
This is a general gay history of Argentina from the Spanish conquest. There seems to be little discussion of poetry in it.
This work deals with the gay history of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. It is the finest history of a city from a gay point of view ever published. Discussion of poetry unknown.
6-9 November 2009