The history of American gay writers as they emerged from the literary closet

How Gossip Became History: Eminent Outlaws by Christopher Bram

The Daily Beast - Brad Gooch

From Gore Vidal to Tony Kushner, a new book, ‘Eminent Outlaws’ by Christopher Bram, traces the history of American gay writers as they emerged from the literary closet. Brad Gooch on how gossip became history. Plus, a gallery of the most famous.   

Once a month or so during the 1970s I had dinner at Joe LeSueur’s teeny apartment down where Second Avenue meets Houston. Dinner was all guys, gay guys, crammed into a little box of a living room, around a table. On the walls I remember a big, blue Joan Mitchell abstract oil painting that she had given to Joe; on another wall a Joe Brainard found-object work, “Cigarette Smoked by Willem De Kooning,” with the Dutch master’s actual scrunched cigarette butt, as relic, or homage, and another beautiful enamel painting by Brainard of a 7-Up logo; some medium-size canvases with swathes of abstract paint unruly enough to have been made by the sweep of a broom by maybe Mike Goldberg or Norman Bluhm. For nearly a decade LeSueur had been the roommate of poet and MoMA curator Frank O’Hara, and the room reflected the smash-cut of poetry and painting of the slightly earlier era.

Inevitably, after dinner, out would come a bottle of cognac and a bottle of grappa and real cigarettes, Tareytons, and fancy cigarettes, joints. The poet Allen Ginsberg (living still a few blocks north of LeSueur) had nailed the issue in an elegy for Frank O’Hara when he wrote of the poet’s gift for “deep gossip.” Certainly “deep gossip” was the lingua franca of these after-dinner dish sessions at LeSueur’s apartment, bleary data dumps that were actually history lessons, full of information only passed by word- of mouth, either because the subjects were too marginal or the material too outré. I learned, for instance, the crucial cultural plot point that Joan Mitchell and Samuel Beckett had been lovers in Paris, and that either he climbed over her garden wall for assignations or she over his. Or that the bitchy nickname for Ruth Kligman, surviving girlfriend of Jackson Pollock’s crash, was “death-car girl.”

Yet most of the gossip concerned literary history, or, less grandly, the messy lives and under-the-radar goings-on of gay male poets, novelists, and playwrights.      

Gay Writers from Tennessee Williams to Truman Capote (Photos)

Photos clockwise from top left: AP, Bettmann-Corbis;Betmann-Corbis; Bettmann-Corbis    

Read the full piece at The Daily Beast.