4

Frank O’Hara’s Moving Pictures

Looking for Hustlers

In June 1963, Frank O’Hara went to a dinner party at the musician Charles Turner’s apartment, where he met an African American hustler called Joe. As O’Hara mentions in a letter to Larry Rivers, Joe was tall and attractive and looked like singer and actor Harry Belafonte, though he described himself in conversation rather more campily, using the moniker of Hollywood icon Marlene Dietrich.1 This quasi-cinematic figure, remembered passingly in this letter, seems a prime example of the poet’s well-documented—or much-rumored— sexual preference for Black men, and for the particular kind of masculinity embodied by the figure of the hustler.2 Hustlers, as Barry Reay argues in his history of them, are defined as “male prostitutes who paraded their masculinity and who were paid for sex with (nearly always) men” and often viewed interchangeably with “trade,” those “ostensibly straight and similarly masculine men, often those in uniform, who would engage in same-sex sex.”3 O’Hara, Reay suggests, had a particular penchant for ostensibly heterosexual men and would often bring sailors back to his apartment in the 1950s.4 And just as the inventory of New York hustler types is a capacious one—from sailors and soldiers to longshoremen from Brooklyn or laborers from New Jersey—the number of gay male New York writers who have dallied with hustlers both on and off the page is extensive. The literary history of gay New York is populated with them.

O’Hara observed his exchange with Joe in a tangible narrative context by suggesting to Rivers that it was like a scene from John Rechy’s cruising novel, City of Night. Rechy’s novel, published that same year and reviewed by O’Hara in Kulchur magazine,5 tells the story of gay street life in the 1960s from the perspective of a hustler, and memorably begins with a panoptic view: “Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard [ . . . ]. America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness.”6 The prevalence of the movies in the novel and in this opening reflection, where Times Square suggests the (in)famous Forty-Second Street movie theaters and Hollywood Boulevard stands in for the studio system as a whole, is pertinent. As Reay writes, it is “fitting that that temple of fantasy, the motion picture house, was so closely associated with hustler sex” and was a “primary site for homosexual contact” from the 1930s and 1940s onward.7 In this chapter, I will argue that O’Hara’s well-known love of the movies is closely related to his engagements with gay cruising. The movie theater seems a sensible place to start, not least because it appears throughout his poetry as a site of heightened sensation where cruising can happen. The poem “Ave Maria,” for example, suggests that the movie theater is as good a place as any to pick up (or be picked up by) strangers, where watching a movie and an anonymous sexual encounter are simultaneous ways of being “truly entertained” (CP, 372). “In the Movies” puns on the simultaneous sense of location that watching a film enacts, where one is both “alone,” depending upon “the screen for accompaniment,” and also aboard “a voyage to Africa” (CP, 208), transported away from these surroundings by the visual narrative one is watching. The viewer is thus both in the movie theater and in the movie itself, splashing away “the afternoon / in the movies / and in the mountains.”

In this poem such simultaneity also has erotic connotations, and the sexual potential of the movie theater is both immediate—the speaker is sat “with my own prick” and addressing the “Ushers! Ushers” who “seek me with your lithe flashlights!” (207)—but also pertains to the mediation of images, and the speaker’s beguilement by the phantasmagoria of the screen and the ambiguous “point of intersection a foot in front of me” (206). Sarah Riggs writes of this poem as describing the “structure of spectatorship” and the “various sites of slippage in the flesh-to-image encounter,” as though the cinema screen negotiates an “invitation to fleshly desires in the absence of a corporeal body.”8 In this sense, movie theaters are not only the site of possible anonymous sexual encounters, but the site of a more profound erotics of seeing, where the visual illusions of spectatorship in the dark involve an ambiguity that is inherently titillating in its difficulty. Darkness is variously important to this poem, with ambivalent results, for as Peter Stoneley writes, “blackness” for O’Hara “is the desired black man, but it is also dark spaces which permit the impermissible,” and these meanings appear simultaneously in this poem.9 Although there is the suggestion of a cruising or hustling encounter in the theater itself, as lines concerned with language such as “this stranger collects me like a sea-story / and now I am part of his marine slang” give way to the mention of “a poem written in blackface” (CP, 208), O’Hara’s “invocation to black phallic being” in this poem has a “sense of quotation and refraction, in that the black figures are familiar Hollywoodized stereotypes: the slave field deep in the south, and African chiefs and princes,” such that we might conceive of this encounter as one where the speaker is “spellbound by the enormities of the screen and of ‘Africa.’”10 Like Hughes’s “Movies,” O’Hara’s poem posits the cinema as a literal iteration of the “screen” of Blackness that is described by Fanon. Mark Goble argues, in a reading of the poem “Vincent and I Inaugurate a Movie Theatre,” that for O’Hara the movie theater demonstrates that “there is fantasy aplenty right in America, ‘our country’s black and white’ past of innumerable Hollywood films replete with racist slapstick, exoticized others, and sublime spectacles of American ideology,” not least the Black Mammy figure, like the maid character played by Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, whom O’Hara refers to in this poem, a cliché to which Hughes’s Sister Mary Bradley from The Sweet Flypaper of Life also knowingly bears some resemblance.11

Both Stoneley and Goble argue that O’Hara’s penchants for both Blackness and for movies are not uncritical fixations. Stoneley suggests that “O’Hara’s invocation of blackness as the primitive” seems “to accept racist clichés but also to throw them into question,” while Goble suggests “that O’Hara argues incessantly with the movies and in so doing makes a series of points about the relationships between language and the visual,” and these “arguments with film [ . . . ] swerve at surprising moments into images of an America whose symbolic coherence is hopelessly intercut with images of racial difference and ideological manipulation.”12 In the light of such critical recuperations, how might we then read O’Hara’s offhand description of Joe the hustler, a passage where, as in “In the Movies,” the screen of Blackness has multiple meanings? Joe, who evidently embodies for O’Hara a certain kind of Black masculinity, is described as being both like camp icon Marlene Dietrich and popular Black entertainer Harry Belafonte. The substitution here of a Black man for Belafonte is vexing, in so far as perceptions of likeness between people of color frequently underpin offensive misapprehensions and microaggressions. This slippage between Joe and a star of the screen also speaks to a larger tendency in O’Hara’s work to engage cruising as an aesthetic economy, where potential hookups are rendered in relation to photographic or cinematic likenesses and to the erotic fantasies attached to movie culture. The fantasy of sleeping with a hustler thus becomes synonymous with the fantasy of sleeping with a movie star. And such looks and hookups do not only occur at parties or in the theaters, but on the streets of a city O’Hara once called “Sodom-on-Hudson” (“Commercial Variations,” CP, 85), where fantasies become daydreams that seek to collapse the gap between the cruiser and the stranger.

To look to O’Hara’s meeting with Joe the hustler as an introductory example is to observe a mode of looking at a flippant extreme, and it also calls to mind the poet’s reference to the “Negro” who “stands in a doorway with a / toothpick, languorously agitating” in the lunch poem “A Step Away from Them” (CP, 257). Aaron Deveson reads this moment as an example of O’Hara’s tendency, shared with Edwin Denby (whose 1964 lecture “Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets” also observes the everyday motions of sailors and African Americans, among others), toward “generalizations about ethnic and cultural difference,” made legible and erotic in the glare of everyday urban space.13 To look beyond these instances toward other examples, then, where the masculinity being “photographed” (to once again borrow Silverman’s gloss of Fanon) is predominantly white working class, is not simply to exonerate O’Hara from these tendencies, but rather to identify a larger mode of erotic looking that is evidently capable of fetishization. This larger mode is given expression in City of Night when Rechy’s narrator walks around Times Square; he notices the “racks of magazines with photographs of almost-naked youngmen like an advertisement for this street,” and then, “the army of youngmen [ . . . ] like photographs in a strange exhibition: slouched invitingly or moving back and forth restlessly.”14 Rechy’s description, which enacts a slippage between photographs and persons, and between the pages of a magazine and the cruising spaces of the street, renders the look as an instrument of visualization. In so doing, it performs exactly the kind of metaphorical work that is central to the argument of this book, and could apply equally to any of the writers I am concerned with. In O’Hara’s work, however, the copresence of still and moving images—of “slouched” statues and “moving” bodies—is of particular importance, and I will thus begin by attending to one of his best-known movie texts, one that articulates the look of cinema as a vision both in, and of, motion.

Marvellous Appearances

O’Hara’s 1955 poem “To the Film Industry in Crisis” is addressed to Hollywood itself and enumerates almost thirty of the industry’s stars. But in its lineation, it also extends a tribute to Whitman, whose influence can be felt numerous times throughout O’Hara’s work, from “memorizing Whitman” in “Dolce Colloquio” (CP, 150) to the sonic inheritance of “A Whitman’s Birthday Broadcast with Static” (CP, 224). It is often as though he is tuning in to his forebear on some oblique frequency, but the particular reemergence of Whitman’s long line is palpable in “To the Film Industry,” which begins with an invocation that recalls the ample anaphoric constructions of “Not . . . nor . . . nor” found in Whitman. O’Hara’s opening lines in turn revive the democratic objective of Whitman’s syntax, the task of reevaluating received distinctions between things and persons, and his conception of a reconstructed cultural hierarchy resembles the ethos of Whitman’s urban poem “City of Orgies,” where it is in fact “Not the pageants [ . . . ] nor the bright windows, with goods in them,” but the more ephemeral “flash of eyes offering me / love,” which “repay me” (LG, 107). These negative constructions bear a peculiar stylistic function, at once lofty and cumbersome. They intensify and defer feeling simultaneously, and even mark a turn toward the grandeur of epic. In giving “credit where it’s due” (CP, 232) to Hollywood movies, but by way of negated apostrophes to such institutions as the “Catholic Church” or the “American Legion,” O’Hara’s list echoes the principle of inclusion that informs much of Whitman’s work, and offers an extension of his quip in “Personism” that “only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies” (CP, 498).

Making such lists can itself be an act of love: as Wayne Koestenbaum writes, “when O’Hara makes a list of items, he adores them. Otherwise, why list them?”15 By taking stock in this way, this poem suggests a different pace to other list-poems that seem, to Koestenbaum, “breathlessly uttered” in “long lines whose speediness announces their credo (a velocity without futurism’s militaristic seriousness).”16 Such poems, like “Poem (O sole mio, hot diggety, nix)” (CP, 367), may attain a certain speed in their associative randomness, but there is nothing inherently speedy about long lines themselves, even if they maintain the illusion of some proportional relation that length and quantity bear to pace, as units which can impose breathlessness upon the voice that tries to read them aloud. According to this conflation, a line may work to curtail the excitement of its passions, or it may give in to that “ecstasy of always bursting forth!” (“Meditations in an Emergency,” CP, 197), but in either case this negotiation of containment implicitly confers momentum and can be mapped onto line endings. O’Hara’s own 1957 recording of the poem plays out slowly. Commissioned for a radio show by Evergreen Review founder Barney Rosset, the recording also features the voice of Jane Freilicher and musical accompaniment by John Gruen.17 Gruen has described how his “offbeat musical noodling” led to the decision to “have a piano roll be the accompaniment [ . . . ] a Steinway Duo-Art which played piano rolls by the hour,” and which for this recording played “a popular song from the thirties” as “Frank and Jane” each read specific lines, with “wonderfully outré” results.18 In choosing a song from the thirties, Gruen roots O’Hara and Freilicher’s reading of the list of names in the cultural past they are largely drawn from, just as the self-playing and mechanized piano melody imitates the kind of presence that movie stars inhabit.

As phantoms of the screen, stars occupy a vexed form of liveness; they are made visible by a projector and destined for repetitions, perhaps accompanied by melodies that roll on a Steinway. This choice of the piano roll acknowledges the way that O’Hara’s poem veers closely to the automated melody of the roll call. Rolling out in this way as a unique “experience,” passed between two voices over music, the list’s most “distinct” notes sound at once glamorous and elegiac. Enthusiasm is counterbalanced with solemnity, as if O’Hara and Freilicher are comperes introducing the stars one by one in the glittery roll call of a Hollywood pageant, or the “in memoriam” segment of an awards ceremony. These stars are after all largely those of yesteryear, drawn from the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio picture that precedes the poem’s eponymous crisis of the 1950s. Koestenbaum writes of the way O’Hara’s poems can stage a “time blur,” an “undoing of chronology and teleology” where the poet “takes artifacts from 1930s culture and propels them forward” into the “now” of the poem as “crystallizations of unfulfilled longing.”19 The list can thus serve not so much to “blur” the present with recourse to the past entities it enumerates, but rather to name a new present which hangs suspended not only in historical time but in the temporality of the work itself, as something made up of constituent parts and read in sequence.

O’Hara’s constellation of stars is temporally various in this way. It operates on Hollywood’s “star system” and the “flash” that Walter Benjamin describes, and lists film actors made present to the popular imaginary not only through the rolling camera of cinema but the flash of photographic stills. Although, as Mark Goble writes, it pays to remain suspicious of the idea of “a basic equivalence between certain techniques of film editing—jump-cuts, swish pans, fade-outs, cutaways, and wipes—and some of O’Hara’s signature techniques for directing readerly attention,” this poem does unfold in units comparable to flashes, with each film star invoked fleetingly in a list that adheres consistently to the formula of name plus image, like the not unlike “strange exhibition” Rechy’s narrator notes.20 Each actor is recalled with the memory of a physical idiosyncrasy, like “Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair” or Sue Carrol sitting “for eternity” on the “damaged fender of a car” (CP, 232). O’Hara’s list is distinguished from mere roll call by preserving each star’s “particularity” and seeking in turn to grant them a sense of “eternity.” It recalls these stars not only with recourse to their monikers but their motions, like the equivalent of a film-still reanimated. Even the stiller-seeming portraits or poses suggested by these images, such as MacDonald’s, are cast with present participles in “flaming” vitality.

In this sense the poem reads intriguingly alongside an essay by a different McDonald, a New York film critic and contemporary of O’Hara’s at Harvard, whose piece “When Words Fail” consists simply of the names of film stars (many of which overlap with this poem) arranged into alphabetized paragraphs, such as “Martin Gabel. Greta Garbo. John Garfield.”21 McDonald is writing in the 1980s and watching these stars revived by the syndication of their films on cable television’s Hall of Fame, many of them by this time dead. The paradox of his essay’s title—paratextually designating a failure of words as the principle of a piece made up only of pairs of words, of which none comprise full sentences—suggests that in the context of such retrospection, it is names in all their specificity that embody the aura of stardom, not words as generally conceived, which could perhaps only “fail” in their vagaries. O’Hara was certainly alive to encountering movie stars from his childhood as part of the then-recent advent of television, but what is curious in his poem is the feeling that even at this point in time, when many of them were still alive, these stars are firmly out of reach. That they are, in this sense, like the already dead.

The poem’s address to the stars can only do so much in reviving their immediate presence, insofar as they themselves are not fixed objects for representation and are in their own way intangible and hologrammatic projections of the silver screen. That the poem can only hail these figures verbally in a loving celluloid ekphrasis further places them out of reach, and they are rendered only as imaginings or recollections of existing reproductions. At the end of the poem O’Hara instructs these “reels” to roll on “as the great earth rolls on!” (CP, 233), in conversation with Whitman’s poem “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” which itself contains the related insight that “bodies are words, myriads of words,” and in the “best poems re-appears the body, man’s or woman’s” (LG, 184). O’Hara’s wish that they may “illumine space with your marvellous appearances” (CP, 232) contains echoes of this Whitmanian sentiment; the sense that bodily presence can reappear through acts of inscription. In this sense it is like the distinction between naming a film or a star one admires on the one hand, and illustrating that admiration on the other; let me count the ways. The iteration of Sue Carrol or Jeanette MacDonald’s physical presence in the poem seeks both to justify and enact their illumination of space beyond its instance on celluloid, which passes in a flash.

The transience threatening these “marvellous appearances” is not only that of the immediate unfolding of a film in time, then, but the relation of this to a graver sense of passing. A flash is neither quite fast nor slow; it simultaneously suggests the temporary or partial while providing the frame for the snapshot, an image whose ephemerality becomes a paradoxical form of lastingness, a crystallization through an aperture fixed. The film stars of this poem are captured at a unique threshold of perception; both the point in history where they face impending obsolescence, becoming passé in the context of the industry and its machinations, and a more profound sense of passing. This latter resonance touches upon a perhaps primally anxious paradox of reproduction; the sense that seeing people captured alive and in motion on-screen for all posterity is necessarily referential to their death, and that these apparitions come to acquire a particularly strange air in the wake of their referents. Images of the passed possess both a magic and a melancholy; they intensify absence just as they can remedy it momentarily by bringing into vision an iteration of that person, such that the reproduction gains a unique resonance or iconicity in the face of paucity. Being iconic is already the remit of the movie star, whose profession at its heart involves skills of presence, a fact to which O’Hara’s poem is alive. The reference to “Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls” (CP, 232) embodies this fragile iconicity by invoking both the girlishness of her persona and the attendant sense of vulnerability conferred by knowledge of her death seven years later, which the poem seems hauntingly to anticipate in summoning the tableau of this larger-than-life personage resting so precariously on a “little spike,” swamped by the waterfall behind her.

Indeed, like the iconic candle in the wind, O’Hara’s descriptions of these stars and their lives appear to flicker. It calls to mind the physical idiosyncrasies of each star at the same time as they fade from view, giving way to the next in the sequence of the list’s unfolding. This poem is not explicitly about the death of movie stars, at least not in the same way that O’Hara’s poems for James Dean are about his untimely demise, and yet its focus upon passing and fragile tableaux indirectly anticipates the elegiac. The metaphor of actors as stars itself seeks to recuperate them from such fading, and they are enshrined as figures who will continue to “shine” on film and remain accessible as reference points in posterity precisely because their charisma is committed to celluloid, as the saying goes. But their being awarded “eternity” surely requires other forms of commitment, lest the light of their presence be destined to shine no more brightly than that of a battery-powered tea-light, and they are fated to appear only during the graveyard time-slots of cable television, like a piano roll playing to an empty music hall. In the schema of O’Hara’s movie poems, these remembered images are only made vivid, and their attendant preservation in a line of poetry is only made possible, by an initial or originary liveness. The importance of the experiential encounter between spectator and movie is foregrounded in “Ave Maria” (CP, 372) where O’Hara distinguishes between the vitality of a child’s possible trip to the movie theater, which can nurture the “soul / that grows in darkness” (and has the added bonus of perhaps even offering their “first sexual experience”), and the stultification that would afflict the same child “old and blind in front of a TV set,” watching movies they weren’t allowed to watch in childhood. Alternatively, this encounter may play out in someone or other’s apartment with a gathering of friends, and Joe LeSueur recalls that O’Hara would often have such movie nights with John Button and James Schuyler.22 In either case, movies for O’Hara must offer a clear sense of occasion, must be experientially distinct from the monotony of sitting “old and blind” before a television set. Such occasion can be fulfilled through the relative liveness—of time and place, at least—that a movie theater can offer, as well as the sexual possibilities such a space can tease, or else the intimacy and shared references of a viewing with friends. Occasion is necessary to make the act of viewing worth preserving, for giving “credit where it’s due.”

In this vein, it is then not enough that these beloved stars are preserved on reels of celluloid but that these reels “roll on”; that Monroe “reels” on vividly by reappearing in the “now” of a poem, which thus restages that encounter in its initial immediacy. This relation to the moving image seems not only like that of the poet but the zealous fan, even the archivist. O’Hara’s enthusiasm for movies and their stars is well documented; his was a form of fandom which critics have not neglected to identify as queer. Laurence Goldstein, writing of this poem’s historical moment as one where “the charismatic power of the movies” is for the “first time in its brief history” felt to be approaching “the passé,” suggests that it is an instance of O’Hara exemplifying the camp sensibility.23 The gay male love of female movie stars is a well-worn trope of camp taste, and “To the Film Industry in Crisis” does appear to be steeped in such a culture. In his classic study of stars and of the relationship between Judy Garland and gay men, Richard Dyer identifies Jeanette MacDonald—O’Hara’s flaming figure—as being “well established as a camp queen,” such that when Garland refers to her in the opening of the song “San Francisco” in her 1961 Carnegie Hall performance, “it was enough to mention MacDonald’s name to get a camp response” from her largely gay male audience.24 But if the shared codes of camp, defined by a love of the excessive and artificial, offer one way of accounting for the gay male love of movie stars, it does not tell the whole story. Garland is a suggestive case study in that, as Dyer notes, it is not just her sense of camp or androgyny that has endeared her to gay audiences, but also her ordinariness and the “emotional quality” of her performance, which demonstrates that the “gay sensibility holds together qualities that are elsewhere felt as antithetical: theatricality and authenticity.”25 Indeed, Joe LeSueur sees “To the Film Industry” in precisely these terms, suggesting that if this poem is even camp at all, it is only of the “high” or “serious” variety, because “Frank shamelessly meant every word—felt every word.”26

“Homosexuality in the movies,” Vito Russo writes in his classic study The Celluloid Closet, “whether overtly sexual or not, has always been seen in terms of what is or is not masculine.”27 It is telling how neatly Russo’s description of Hollywood cinema maps onto the realm of the street hustler once again, in a move away from a camp fixation with the female. If the interior spaces of movie-watching or movie-going are associated with certain forms of love (the last section of “In the Movies” ends with the lines “If love is born from this projection [ . . . ] / I love you” [CP, 209], while “To the Film Industry” proffers a love of the passing and the passé in the face of a crisis), the cinematic economies of affect and desire outside of such spaces are altogether different. In his essay “Leaving the Movie Theater,” Roland Barthes describes the “reverie” of the movie theater experience, where the “dark” is both the “very substance” of such a state and “the ‘color’ of a diffused eroticism,” and in his formulation the “movie house” is “a site of availability (even more than cruising)” that accommodates “the inoccupation of bodies” which “best defines modern eroticism [ . . . ] that of the big city.”28 For Barthes, it is “in this urban dark that the body’s freedom is generated,” and such freedom gives way to a porosity not unlike the situation of “idleness, leisure, free time” that prefigures the decision to go to the movies.29 But what happens after the credits roll, and you return from the libidinal darkness to the peripatetic cruising space of the “big city”? Looking beyond O’Hara’s poetry and toward his dalliances with film itself, the next section of this chapter will take such a walk.

Brandos of the Boulevard

Two film texts from the bookends of O’Hara’s oeuvre invoke a cinematic mode of attention as a feature of gay cruising. One of them, the beginning “for a movie scenario,” was jotted in his Harvard journal from 1948 (and published only posthumously); the other, a more complete film script in collaboration with Alfred Leslie, was still being written a few months before O’Hara’s death in 1966. The Harvard scenario lays out a familiar scene, perhaps its first iteration in O’Hara’s writing, which has distinctly European influences:

We are looking up a street: noon light, early spring. A row of street lamps like sick tulips blooms metallically in the sun as a speck on the distant stretch of sidewalk grows larger, approaches. It is a man in his early thirties wearing a restrained simper, a lavender tie, and such an elegant stroll that he might almost have gone to school with Harold Acton. He is humming a song of his own composition entitled Your Room Is Awfully Pleasant but I Think I’ll Run Along; it is, of course, Gerard Purble, and as his eyes roll about with what we immediately recognize is an habitually avid curiosity the camera takes over their action, scooting under taxicabs, into store windows, peering into faces, down bodices, hurrying here, lingering there, distorting features and accidentals (to be worked out in detail), etc.30

These images, the most narratively coherent of the “scenario,” echo the lunch-poet figure O’Hara would later come to inhabit in New York; the man in his thirties in a tie, strolling the streets with an “avid curiosity”—and perhaps a slightly greater sense of workday urgency—and sporting a look inflected as queer. The layers of visual detail in this scene range from fairly obvious associations, like that between simpering and effeteness, to signs that involve a more particular knowledge of the contemporary homosexual aesthetic. For one, the reference to Harold Acton, the writer and old Etonian who provided some of the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, invites a whole host of associations, not least those of the European aesthete and the age of decadence, which are hallmarks in the homosexual imagination. Walking is cast here as a mode of performing social class through its intersection with sexuality. The “elegant stroll” refers back to a culture embodied by Eton College and more broadly that of the dandy, and propels the associated qualities of aestheticism and effeminacy into a contemporary American scene, where the “sidewalk” replaces the pavement or boulevard.

The lavender tie offers a signal more obviously American than European in alluding to the conflation of the color with homosexuality (concealed or otherwise) that had been used since the 1920s, with one of its earliest incarnations attributed to Cole Porter’s song “I’m a Gigolo.” This phrase was to find a new and unwelcome cultural resonance as the name for the so-called Lavender Scare that began in February 1950 with the speech given by Deputy Undersecretary John Peurifoy to Congress. Peurifoy warned of an infiltration of the federal government by homosexuals in the same month as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech about such an infiltration by Communists, which ushered in the era of fear that was to form the political backdrop of O’Hara and his wider artistic community’s lives in New York for several years. As David K. Johnson writes, the “Red Scare now had a tinge of lavender,” as a moral panic which also marked the increasing dangers for public officials of cruising Lafayette Park, Washington’s famous cruising spot.31 Cruising, like the subcultural concealment of homosexuality that characterized its practice at this time, requires a euphemistic language and visual signals that can point in at least two directions, and it is an implicit presence in O’Hara’s movie scenario. Even Gerard’s “song of his own composition,” Your Room Is Awfully Pleasant but I Think I’ll Run Along, sounds like it could be the ditty of a botched cruise: a quick exit perhaps sung in the leisurely idiom of a Cole Porter musical. This utterance gestures to the camp in its effusive diction (“awfully pleasant”) and limp sense of propriety (“but I think I’ll run along”), and it conjures a voice equal parts stylized and repressed. In the situation it riffs upon, it also calls to mind the willful humor of contradiction on show in the entry O’Hara writes for Ronald Firbank, another intertextual presence associated with a particular stylistic excess, in his poem “Biographia Letteraria”: “I will not go home with you, so perhaps I shall” (CP, 464). To be running along or passing by in such a scenario is to play upon the partial vision of the street—passing a desirous stranger and all the while “passing” as straight—and suggests that walking is of especial importance in this performance. In between states of “hurrying here, lingering there,” and largely without recourse to the verbal, the walk performs a look which lasts a “second longer” than that of “normal people,” to recall O’Hara’s jesting reference to the homosexual “look.” This look also often refers, like Gerard’s, to the gait and gaiety of lavender figures like Acton, as though a peripatetic flamboyance is something one learns by imitation.

This early journal entry is a curious discovery, trying out in a minor key and laying out in miniature, on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, an aesthetics of urban walking that is central to some of O’Hara’s best-known New York poems. If sitting before the silver screen is a place to be dazzled by the more glamorous, practiced, and even esoteric motions of movie stars “reclining and wiggling” (CP, 232) within the worlds of their cinematic plots, the street’s gesture is the walk, a performance that plays out on the sidewalk daily. This walk does not occur inside an already given narrative situation (other than that suggested by factors like the time of day or the neighborhood one is walking in) and thus becomes imaginative fodder for its observer, as a phenomenon out of which a narrative, and speculations as to personhood, might arise. This kind of attention to another’s motion is thus distinct, if subtly, from the corresponding way one might catch someone’s eye in an interior social setting like a bar or a party. Living openly within the parameters of his queer coterie, O’Hara not only frequented artist’s bars like the Cedar Tavern and the San Remo in Greenwich Village, or jazz clubs like the Five Spot, but danced in gay bars like the Old Place, which he pays tribute to in his ebullient 1955 poem “At the Old Place” (CP, 223–24). Describing this bar, Joe LeSueur writes: “When I say the place was gay, I don’t mean it was anything like what came later, in the sex-crazed seventies, the pre-AIDS period when you sniffed poppers, snorted coke, and had sex on the dance floors of the more raunchy queer joints. No, the Old Place was sweet and innocent, more limp-wristed than S&M or pseudo-macho.”32 O’Hara, LeSueur continues, was only in it for the dancing—“in the time I knew him” he “never cruised gay bars”—but an early work like “All the mirrors in the world,” which was written during the period when O’Hara began to visit New York and eventually moved there in the fall of 1951, suggests his familiarity with the ocular mechanism of bar cruising.33 The speaker imagines his “eyes in, say, the glass / of a public bar” as they “become a / depraved hunt for other re- / flections,” for anything “but the old shadowy bruising, / anything but my private haunts” (CP, 39), and this scene rhymes multiply (“bruising”) with the phenomenon of cruising as a “hunt” in a bar, a self-reflective mirror, and a solution to the “private” pains of repression. And if gay bars were not a regular fixture for O’Hara, who traversed gay New York at a historical precipice, in those years preceding Stonewall which nonetheless anticipated the “sex-crazed seventies,” he certainly went to a lot of parties, no doubt full of gay men who behaved much as if they had gone to school with Harold Acton.

In the second film text, Act & Portrait, a rarely discussed 1966 script devised with Alfred Leslie, the act of cruising on the street is made cinematic in a number of ways, and unfolds both as a film and in relation to film culture. Strangers are conceived of as cinematic characters, or as figures possessing some essence of Hollywood actors. Laying out a walk that begins on Fourteenth Street and finishes in Central Park, this script is a more complete object than the film scenario from the Harvard journal, albeit with its own complex compositional history. In the first instance it seems to share with O’Hara’s earlier scenario a passing interest in European aestheticism, including an English paraphrase out of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel À rebours: “I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms (and bosoms), untired pleasures.”34 This balmy scene of erotic potential finds metaphorically consonant completion with the “cruising fairies” O’Hara encounters in the next paragraph, on “Seventh Avenue and Greenwich,” and these figures invite rumination of a more overtly political nature:

Like St. Eulalia, I looked at the cruising fairies with compassion. I definitely think that sex should be allowed between consenting adults. The only question is how to become adult. Let them worry about that as long as they’re let. Of course nobody wants to be alone, maybe they need the police like Negroes need Mississippi. Consent has nothing to do with it. You look around and you can’t find anything to consent to. All you can do is try to forget it. (165)

O’Hara, in his characteristically irreverent approach to political subjects, here repeats words associatively at their beginnings and ends (“consenting adults” to “adult,” and “Let” to “let”) such that the passage seems continually to digress. It lingers like the men themselves and puns on the sense that there are hustlers among these fairies who are “let” like rent boys. Nevertheless, cruising emerges in the process as the vexed site where a gay political struggle might play out. Such a struggle is made legible by possible forms of intimacy and companionship—“Of course nobody wants to be alone” (165)—that are then obliquely compared to the numerous civil rights struggles of African Americans in Mississippi around this time, evidenced particularly by the murder of three civil rights workers in June 1964.

This passage suggests political awareness by way of indirection, and the speaker’s flippant naivety is nonetheless still alive to the sinister social reality being gestured to, even if all one can do “is try to forget about it.” The next paragraph recommends as much, making reference to the fact that “Miles is now in Viet Nam. Brave stand. Where was he when the cop hit Julian over the head? Where was I?” (166). These sentences, similarly, seem barely to contain the sarcasm evident in casting Vietnam activism as “brave” just as they nevertheless foreground details of an increasingly repressive city. The vacant building of Julian Beck’s Living Theatre is passed earlier in the script’s walk—it “sure looks dead, yak” (164)—and Beck himself was imprisoned briefly in 1963 in a conflict with the police over the occupation of the theater space. This is the paradoxical political texture of much of O’Hara’s writing; it sidesteps sincere imperatives to collective action while being palpably aware of what might be under threat. Such brushing aside is consonant with what Susan Sontag describes as camp’s “comic vision of the world,” a sensibility intended to “dethrone the serious” by way of “underinvolvement” and “detachment.”35 Sontag goes as far as to suggest that such a “sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical,” thus reducing it to a form of complacent triviality without acknowledging the way that the “apolitical” might be performed or harnessed for resistant ends.36 An insensitive joke might also serve as a way of being in the world: as a quietly defiant refusal to yield to the solemnity of a political reality that has been historically antagonistic toward gay men.

Act & Portrait also includes projections of foreign spaces from the historical present: “It was cold. Soft bombs are falling into our hard Arctic palmtrees. We are softly bombing our insides, our tough skin will splinter, our shell will fall away” (AN, 165). This passage seems both surreal and lucid, and invokes a military elsewhere that is inscrutable for being incongruous yet obvious in its reference to wars past and present, and most immediately the aforementioned conflict in Vietnam. Gay cruising is rendered as military several times in O’Hara’s work, just as penetration is here made atomic in Act & Portrait. The poem “Grand Central” (CP, 168–69), which illustrates “wheels” of machinery “thundering,” casts the act of fellatio in the train station’s latrine thus: “He unzipped the messenger’s trousers / and relieved him of his missile, hands / on the messenger’s dirty buttocks, / the smoking muzzle in his soft blue mouth.” Cruising in “Grand Central” constitutes a rewriting of the body through annihilation. The speaker gestures to “an anonymous body,” perhaps his own, that is “reconstructed from a model of poetry” and “riddled with bullets” (CP, 168), and such lacerations resemble the way the subject’s skin and shell are pierced in Act & Portrait. This texture not only gestures toward the situational pain or violence that a cruise gone wrong (or right) might incur, but a more profound sense of threat and domination figured by military conflict, one that could be fatal or indeed “terminal,” another word for Grand Central’s concourses. By yoking sexual acts to the potential violence—which could be that of the stranger, the police, the militarized state in conflict abroad—O’Hara recuperates the seeming insouciance of these connections by suggesting that cruising is both implicated in these larger realities and can resist them.

To cruise the latrines is also to cruise the frontline of social belonging, or to inhabit a kind of masochistic relation to the police, whom the “cruising fairies” need like “Negroes need Mississippi.” Under the flippant “shell” of these instances is an acute questioning of filiation itself, soiled by “dirty buttocks,” and this exploration extends further back to the foundation of belonging as constructed by the family. What O’Hara describes in “All the mirrors in the world” (CP, 39) as the “shadows / of my childhood” also loom large in the exposures at play in Act & Portrait. The sight of two nuns walking by prompts “thoughts of my childhood and dirty underwear. My socks” (AN, 165). This is a good example of the way O’Hara sets up the reflective only to deflate it: invoking “dirty underwear” in relation to figures of religion suggests an antagonism between the dirty sexuality of the “depraved hunt” underlying the walk and one’s upbringing, until it is deflated by the clarification as “socks.” These instances, in the main oblique and ambivalent, draw upon both history and humor, upon phrases torn between seriousness and parody. What is being engaged in is not a straightforwardly serious politics of cruising. Instead, these instances borrow from cruising’s textures, shooting indirect glances at its experiential reality and only glimpsing what endangers it, fittingly, in passing.

At first glance, these film texts seem a great distance from the big Hollywood pictures O’Hara eulogizes in “To the Film Industry in Crisis.” They are sketches of cruising scenes which range from the aestheticized to the dirty, and have largely been ignored in critical work on O’Hara, although Daniel Kane refers briefly to the “surrealist, libidinal melange” of Act & Portrait as “supplementary evidence of O’Hara’s participation in the experimental film scene.”37 Such evidence, Kane argues, helps to “rectify the notion that his taste as cineaste was solely popular,” and “the disconnect between ‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’” was one that O’Hara “worked to eliminate through his enthusiastic embrace of any number of filmic approaches.”38 Richard Moore’s short USA: Poetry documentary on O’Hara from 1966 offers further evidence of O’Hara’s desire to transgress formal distinctions. In a scene of O’Hara and Alfred Leslie walking down the street, Moore’s voiceover suggests that “in part the film script” the two men are writing “is derived from [ . . . ] ‘To the Film Industry in Crisis.’”39 The connections between these works, an experimental short film on the one hand and a capacious, Whitmanian love letter to Hollywood on the other, are not immediately forthcoming. However, in a filmed outtake of the two men chatting about the film, and following O’Hara’s adamant declaration that “I love Truffaut and that’s that” (a further corrective to the notion that his love of big studio pictures precluded a leaning also toward the auteur), O’Hara asks Leslie, “Do you believe in the star system, Alfred?” The camera ironically moves away from the documentary’s stars to focus on Leslie’s cat, following its movements, as its owner replies, with an image that should by now sound familiar, “The star system? You mean the heavenly bodies that go by . . . yeah, why not.”40

This echo of the celestial bodies who “illumine space” in O’Hara’s poem speaks to a narrative interest in archetype in Act & Portrait, and suggests that the street might have its own star system of spotlit bodies who “go by” ephemerally. At one point, the script’s speaker encounters one such body, less heavenly than it is sinister, but nevertheless referential to a “star” quality: “Guys in black leather jackets give me the creeps. Who doesn’t want to be Marlon?” (AN, 164). Amid the film’s associative momentum, with its speaker piling up details of sights, sounds, and thoughts as they appear, this Marlon-wannabe goes by quickly and is not granted a full encounter. Nonetheless, he makes an impression. Like Gerard Purble, whose walk was such that “he might almost have gone to school with Harold Acton,” this figure further suggests a physiognomy of the “look” as derived through imitation, his style copied from the cultural trends ushered in by “stars” and the characters they inhabit. So much so, it seems, as to be derivative, for “who doesn’t want to be Marlon?” The aura of ’50s and ’60s Marlon Brando, embodied chiefly by his star turn in The Wild One (1953) as the leather-jacketed biker Johnny Stabler and his tour-de-force performance as Stanley Kowalski in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), “conveyed,” Reay writes, “precisely the homoeroticism associated with trade that blended same- and opposite-sex sexualities.”41

Just as O’Hara “illustrates” in topographical and site-specific cruising poems like “Homosexuality” and “Grand Central” that “gossip and cruising” can appear “as kindred queer practices,” Chad Bennett writes, “each forms whose performance of privacy holds out the potential to remap the contours of public spaces”; gossip about the sexual orientations of male movie stars like Brando or James Dean could in turn inform the semiotics of cruising practices.42 The association of a certain kind of masculine cool and a blue-collar authenticity with “rough trade” recalls the prototype-based “gay semiotics” identified by Hal Fischer, one in which dreaming erotically of a “cowboy” involves not the invention of a new figure but the queering of an iconic masculinity that is ubiquitous in the American imaginary from Western films, for example. Such reveries might be dreams or nightmares; tender or dangerous, and in the world of sexual desire these are not necessarily separate states. Why else does this Marlon look-alike give the speaker of Act & Portrait, mock-prudishly, the “creeps”? The appearance of “guys in leather jackets,” while highly imitative in so far as it pertains to performing Marlon Brando performing a motorcyclist or a longshoreman, suggests both an erotic potential and a threat of danger. These contiguous variables are at once exciting and can give one “the creeps.” This Brando figure exists in chorus with the later apprehension in the script of the “cruising fairies,” and these constitutive “types” in cruising may be distinguished from one another according to respective performances of masculinity or effeminacy but can nevertheless cohere in one person looking to be “let.” In this regard the “fairy” and the leather-jacketed Marlon belong, as simultaneous extremes, to the same form of role-play that is embodied by the “star” system in which Brando is a leading light.

Writing around the same time as Vito Russo, who in The Celluloid Closet traces the imbrication of masculinity and homosexuality on-screen, Boyd McDonald frames the men of the street not only as akin to those of the movies but as their substitute, and addresses what he perceives to be a contemporary lack of masculine wattage:

Motion pictures are for people who like to watch women; the men in pictures, as Bette Davis and [Pauline] Kael herself have said, are not men. There’s better stuff on the streets, any street; the streets are my cinema, the male whores my Brandos of the boulevard, the only time I see on the streets men like those who appear in pictures—Warren Beatty, Ronnie Reagan, Robert Taylor, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford and so on—is when by coincidence I pass, just as it is letting out, a dance school.43

McDonald is here writing of male stardom in the 1980s, although the fey elegance suggested by “dance students” (defiantly unlike “men”) seems to speak to the sort of vintage male presence O’Hara affirms in his reference to Fred Astaire “of the feet” in “To the Film Industry” (CP, 232). While O’Hara displays a wider embrace of movie stars both male and female, McDonald’s statement nevertheless speaks to the gendered particularities of charisma in the gay imagination. Watching “women” on-screen speaks to a camp relation to the cinema, as distinct from the more straightforwardly carnal attraction to men, who in McDonald’s formulation are distinguished thus by eschewing the flourishes of the “men in pictures” or those at “dance school.” That is not to say that the men in pictures are not ripe for gay recuperation. Just as characters can be brought into the collusive and erotic orbit of their gay viewers to “mean” a certain way, the “Brandos of the boulevard” turn tricks around others “know[ing]” what they “mean,” and thus depend upon the same kinds of artifice as the fairies or queens who reperform the mannerisms of female film stars. The street as a space of trade may confer some sense of authenticity, lending the “male whores” a gritty realism, but this site nevertheless exists for McDonald in analogous relation to the “cinema,” and its “whores” rely upon imitating “Brando.” These men may be found on “any street” but can also be said, in this sense, to be men who “appear in pictures,” who draw upon recognized codes of dress or appearance that are not merely peculiar to them but belong to a shared subterranean and semiotic vocabulary. And they can also be found elsewhere in O’Hara’s writing, waiting on street corners to be looked at.

Songs and Sight Queens

Act & Portrait goes À rebours not only through its allusion to Huysmans but in the mode of its composition, insofar as Leslie and O’Hara’s conversations suggest that the film’s visual and verbal components are intended to run against one another. In Moore’s documentary, O’Hara is shown sitting at his typewriter in his apartment working on the script while Leslie sits behind him discussing the accompanying images. This is a neat visual approximation of their respective roles in the making of the film, of image and text as simultaneous. O’Hara’s split attention here—he also takes a phone call while writing, and includes a phrase from this conversation in the final script—is consonant with anecdotes that enshrine him as the improvisational lunch-poet, for whom writing is itself a form of multitasking. Leslie, keeping track of O’Hara’s typing, observes that “We’ve timed this now up to here—we have 3 minutes and 40 seconds,” as though the process is akin to a form of musical composition, with the image’s soundtrack being constructed around a careful negotiation of timings.44 In “Second Edition,” however, the collected outtakes of the film, the relation between O’Hara’s words and Leslie’s images seems as much one of discord, with Leslie wanting “to keep the whole thing full of those images, just sort of write it through, and then we’ll play it together, we’ll play it against the picture and see what it’s like, see what it feels like.”45 O’Hara responds that rehearsing this will also be “to time it, sort of.” Leslie, less interested in timing all of a sudden, suggests “Well, not to time, but to see . . . if you were reading it, while you were watching the film, then you’ll be able to proximate in some way how the total sense of the two levels will work.” One thing upon which they agree is that they “want it to be against the movie,” for “the printed dialogue” to be “against [ . . . ] what we’re looking at in the scene.”46

In the case of Act & Portrait, simultaneity is a feature of the script itself. Its attention is divided between the present-tense “quiet walk along 14th Street and 7th Avenue and 23rd Street” (AN, 164) and its ostensible backstory, a fraught ménage-a-trois between the characters of Dorothea, Miles, and John (played by their namesakes Dorothea Rockburne, Miles Forst, and John Ahearn, artist friends of O’Hara and Leslie’s). Leslie describes how “at the beginning of the film Dorothea starts making love to Miles, and then John is laying there,” after which point Dorothea and John are then “making love” for the “rest of the film,” while in the outtakes his projection of what will be on-screen involves “the warmth of the bed, the sexuality of the scene to play something against it all the time.”47 While the script suggests the setting of the street, it would appear that the “picture” itself remains firmly in the bedroom. This can be corroborated, somewhat, by all that appears to have survived of this film (a fire in Leslie’s studio in 1966 destroyed many of his prints). A 1965 film, also called Act & Portrait, appears to be an early attempt. It is made up of selections from ten hours of black-and-white 8 mm film shot in 1964 that came to provide the visual assets for five different shorts gathered under the title Birth of a Nation (1965).48 The exact nature of the relation between these films, which largely use the same images, is complicated by the destruction of Leslie’s archive, but in any case the Act & Portrait section corroborates what the documentary makes known about the project. It features images of three lovers in bed that are offset against a soundtrack of music and dialogue, as consistent with the other collected films, and O’Hara’s script is present as subtitles, with minor variations.

In conversation with O’Hara, Leslie distinguishes between two kinds of image-making, and suggests that they “keep the whole thing [the script] full of those images” that they will then play “against the picture.”49 The film’s dual image arises, in this sense, from the tense interplay between text and image, from the way the story being told through “shots” runs against the visual narrative of the walk suggested by the subtitles, thus inviting a viewer to look in several ways. These are distinct but porous forms of representation, and in plot terms inflect one another in such a way as to suggest a temporal gap. It suggests that the written walk might be taking place after a bedroom scene. The script begins with the statement “We walked [down] 14th Street. It was cold,” which becomes the scene for John’s inner ruminations. Several paragraphs later:

We walked on and on, hating each other. The air was better in bed. Now my eyes hurt, I’m coughing and out of cigarettes. I looked at them on the corner of 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue. I wanted to lie down and be run over. It will come anyway. I didn’t come, but it will. Miles did. Come. (AN, 164)

O’Hara reads from this section in Moore’s documentary, holding the typescript page he has just finished. As he begins with “We walked on and on, hating each other,” he turns to Leslie to explain “they’re on 14th Street,” bringing an urban-geographical axis of orientation to bear upon this already crowded intersection of words and pictures, as though this is one other factor in “play” to remain aware of. Following on, the script takes us in a flash to “23rd Street and Seventh Avenue,” then later arrives farther south, at “Seventh Avenue and Greenwich,” before finishing at “Central Park” by way of the “Plaza” Hotel and its exclusive “Oak Room” bar (a rarefied cruising spot at the time). The trajectory of this walk borrows from a cinematic grammar of movement, and the ability to cheat time and jump from one area to another in the space of a paragraph or sentence. Each mention of a new place has the feel of punctuation, which diverts the text away momentarily from John’s thoughts and provides new stimuli. Yet, as here, where the street corner becomes the occasion for reflecting upon being run over (eerie in the light of O’Hara’s fatal accident months later), and then upon Miles and ejaculation, the urban sights soon come to be incorporated into John’s ramblings and inflected by the sexual dynamics of the threesome plot.

In its principle of accompaniment as opposition, of writing that “runs against” or “after” the film’s plot, O’Hara’s contribution to Act & Portrait is compositionally similar to his involvement in other film projects. In addition to his screenplays for Leslie and a never-to-be-realized project directed by Andy Warhol, O’Hara also played a “real role” in Rudy Burckhardt’s films, “playing piano in some of Burckhardt’s efforts from the 50s” and also, as Burckhardt’s wife Yvonne Jaquette explains in an interview with Daniel Kane, “gave Rudy advice on what music to include [ . . . ]. ‘Oh, try Wagner there, try Grieg there.’”50 These musical contributions are analogously related to O’Hara’s screenplays insofar as they involve tracks to “run against” a picture, and suggest a way of conceiving of his texts as a form of soundtrack, except that they do not provide sound at all and are presented in Leslie’s films through subtitles. As an addition to the film’s sound and image, this textual track is an interjection that further vexes sense and plot and multiplies the viewer’s imaginings of what is out of frame by suggesting a voice and narrative that cannot be seen or heard. These semantic difficulties also speak to the fact that poetry and film can be strange bedfellows. O’Hara, in conversation with Moore, states:

The reason that I’m interested in movies is not as a substitute for poetry, but who is making it. If Al is making it, then I am interested in the sense that I can understand what it’s going to be, or that I know that it’s at least going to be something interesting for me.51

This account serves to corroborate the sense that, for O’Hara, collaborating with visual artists is not something undertaken for its own sake, but rather informed by a highly personal, and even coterie-related impulse.52 Outside of this rationale, O’Hara’s “reason” seems to withhold more than explain, but it nevertheless offers the important distinction that movies are “not a substitute” for poems, and thus any account of their shared activities requires a more elastic conceptual apparatus. Film and poetry are in a crucial sense wildly different materials, demanding distinct forms of attention on the part both of their creators and their audiences. Sarah Riggs writes that when “O’Hara conflates different art forms [ . . . ] he does so not for the sake of likeness, but rather to create an effect of emergence, of what ‘is,’ out of the tension between media.”53

So what “is” this film, in its whole and constituent parts? Its presence in Moore’s 1966 documentary suggests that it remained of interest to Leslie and O’Hara beyond the previous 1965 segment and was set for a different and fuller realization. In the context of O’Hara’s oeuvre it sits as a rarely discussed prose curio, a text unmistakably in O’Hara’s voice with no discernible other incarnation. Yet this script, if at times inchoate, speaks playfully to threads that are resonant elsewhere in O’Hara’s work, and suggests an interplay between text and image, walking and looking, and cruising and the movies. Quite what constitutes Act & Portrait is indeterminate; its only complete remnant is O’Hara’s script, but the film’s never-completed realization hangs over its textual iteration. Act & Portrait asks to be visualized, and its imagined life as a film can be composed multiply by working solely from the text, or by piecing together the documentary evidence we have of the film’s creation. Leslie and O’Hara’s conversations, in this regard, at least provide something of a vague blueprint for the images “against” which the text can “run.”

Poems, too, invite visualizations, and O’Hara’s “Song” (CP, 327) suggests a further sense that poems—as lines of text which are “full of [ . . . ] images”—can realize imagined filmic manifestations for which they provide a track to run against, over, or after them. The poem’s compositional situation speaks both to the ambiguities of sight and materiality in “In the Movies” and to the apprehension in Act & Portrait of the “guys in black leather jackets.” This poem’s “Brando of the boulevard,” to return to McDonald’s phrase, “comes along,” and is caught momentarily “in the city.” The poem turns on—and is turned on by—a notion of dirtiness as both an urban and erotic condition:

Is it dirty

does it look dirty

that’s what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty

that’s what you think of in the city

you don’t refuse to breathe do you

Dirt is distributed here between surface and depth, interior and exterior: maybe it just “look[s]” dirty, or “seem[s]” dirty. This question of materiality is figured in the poem’s imperative image of thought: “run your finger along your no-moss mind / that’s not a thought that’s soot.” A dirty mind names a way of looking at something, and dirt is something you look at, or for. It is also an instrument of attraction, or a stylistic detail through which to shoot a look. Anthropologist Mary Douglas conceptualizes dirt and “uncleanness” as “matter out of place,” as “that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained.”54 O’Hara’s poem illustrates how dirt, as an erotic variable, can nonetheless depend upon a constructed pattern of disorder. A detail “out of place”—disheveled hair, a leather jacket slung an inch off one shoulder, a handkerchief hanging from a pocket—can be a deliberate way of performing disorder and signaling some inner dirtiness legible to those looking for it. The poem’s initial concern for surface and visibility echoes a similar moment in Act & Portrait, written in the same year as the publication of Douglas’s study, where the speaker observes that “Pollution isn’t interesting, you can’t even see it. I’m a sight queen, I guess. If you can’t see it, it isn’t there. Until it hits you. Boom” (AN, 164). Considerations of sight and pollution here collude with the bawdy gay humor of the “size queen,” and this point of intersection speaks clearly to the process of cruising. Reading a desired stranger—what they look like, how they “seem”—is to “see” them as though in a dirty picture, and leads easily into the explicit fantasies of anatomy that are the remit of the “size queen.” Read him wrongly, though, and he “hits you. Boom.”

The “city” of the poem thus enables a phenomenology of encounter that is equal parts dirty and dangerous, where questions of “sight” become a matter of sizing someone up, with the risk that they size up to you if things go awry. This is “what you think of in the city,” as in Act & Portrait, where moments after seeing Marlon, O’Hara muses, “They used to take walks to read. Monks in Cloisters, nuns in Bryant Park. Now we take walks to not talk. The air is nice, anyway. It’s not Malibu it’s something” (AN, 165). This moment reads like a clean-cut iteration of “Song,” where you do “not talk” but “think,” where you “read” the surface of the city and its passing strangers instead of scripture, and the “air” is consequently not “nice” but “dirty.” This “Song” thus emerges as a soundtrack to a cruising scene, as though it were something like Gerard Purble’s hummed “song of his own composition.” Indeed, as the proverb it refers to goes, this “mind” can gather “no moss,” rolling at speed through the sight queen’s questions: “he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very / he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes” (CP, 327). It also recalls again Barthes’s reflection upon the erotic hypnotism of both movie theaters and streets. This comparison then leads him to think “of music: isn’t there such a thing as hypnotic music?,” and this is a schema where a song might be both the accompaniment to and the means of the “most venerable of powers: healing.”55 O’Hara’s song animates the soporific eroticism of spectating by focusing in on the way that “character” is made legible by the “look.” The character’s “bad”-ness also refers to the other pop form of the movies, and he is made attractive by the image of villainy or delinquency that his look suggests. The liveness of the street is enfolded into the mediations of the movies, in a poem whose title signals its live reperformance, and which narrates an act of cruising ripe for repetition in a habitual present: “that’s what you think of in the city.”

In its curious, even didactic deployment of the second-person to describe “what you think” in the face of gay urban masculinity, “Song” calls to mind another cruising scenario famously described by Leo Bersani, which is to say not only that it is well-known but also that it courts, in its very construction, the air of being a prolific or folkloric truth. Indeed, it is a “classic putdown”:

The butch number swaggering into a bar in a leather get-up opens his mouth and sounds like a pansy, takes you home, where the first thing you notice is the complete works of Jane Austen, gets you into bed, and—well, you know the rest.56

This quip would appear to put paid to Boyd McDonald’s hard-and-fast distinction between the fey men of 1980s movies and the butch “Brandos” of the boulevard or, in this case, the leather bar. Look behind the surface of the Brando “get-up,” it suggests, and you may be in for a surprise. Bersani observes that this “mockery of gay machismo is almost exclusively an internal affair, and is based on the dark suspicion that you may not be getting the real article.”57 Though the joke itself is banal, and relies upon the stereotypical assumption that any fan of Jane Austen must be a sexual bottom, Bersani’s rendering of it offers other layers. D. A. Miller reads this moment in Bersani’s essay as a seeming disavowal of Austen—who is associated, in the logic of the joke, with male sexual insufficiency—that is in fact a studied and clever imitation of her. This imitation ranges from:

the confident ironic presentation of a universally acknowledged truth, to the wit that hones this truth into trenchant epigrammatic point, to the even more terrible sophistication that, while leaving its ostensible victim unaware of how he is being judged, keeps the dark cloud of shame that fails to descend on him hanging ominously over us, as our prospective downfall if we should fail, or fail to pretend, to “know the rest.”58

The “I” of Bersani’s joke, Miller suggests, transfers the desire for a masculine top—a desire that is perhaps his own, and remains embarrassingly unmet by the superficially “butch” devotee of Austen and “victim” of the joke—onto the “you” who is reading. This “I,” Miller writes, has “been commuted into a generalized ‘you’” and in turn this “so-called narrator has in fact faded into that universal utterance which, even in Austen’s own works, we can never quite read as hers.” This “fading somehow shifts our sexual understanding of him: from his role in the anecdote as a disappointed bottom, his accession to narration virtually refigures him into the voice of a supercilious top” or even “the general voice of heterosexuality itself, mocking the faggotry it observes” (7).

For Miller, the astuteness of Bersani’s writing here is thus that it performs what he argues is a dominant principle in Jane Austen’s style: a personal style which is, paradoxically, impersonal, and founded upon “de-materializing the voice that speaks it” (6–7). Miller’s reading in fact speaks to O’Hara’s “Song” in a number of ways. Firstly, there is an obvious thematic connection, in that “Song” is also animated by conjecture about outward masculinity and its codes. Indeed, it would be easy to read the poem’s interrogative veering—“is it dirty [ . . . ] does it just seem dirty” or “is he really. yes. very”—as arising from a similar erotic situation to the one outlined by Bersani, if we take “dirty” to mean dominant, “bad” to mean a top, and its speaker to be, perhaps, an inquisitive bottom. But more than this, O’Hara’s use of “you”—there is no “I” here—along with the proverbial or aphoristic diction of “that’s what you think of in the city,” “no-moss mind,” and “you don’t refuse to breathe do you,” both implicate the poem’s reader in a manner akin to the impersonal style that Miller theorizes. “Song” is a poem full of desire—for rough trade, and for the interpretive work of desiring itself—but this erotic charge is displaced and depersonalized. It is attributed as much to the “you” reading the poem as the speaker who hides behind this address, and, as we shall see, the queer “look” of O’Hara’s poems is structured around this same stylistic principle of indirection.

A Beautiful Walk

In another “Song” (CP, 367), from 1960, O’Hara imagines the gaze of the locutory scenario turned back upon himself:

Did you see me walking by the Buick repairs?

I was thinking of you

having a Coke in the heat it was your face

I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian’s

I was thinking of you

and down at the railroad tracks where the station

has mysteriously disappeared

I was thinking of you

as the bus pulled away in the twilight

I was thinking of you

and right now

This poem crystallizes the simultaneous unfolding of thinking and seeing, stillness and motion, that have been constitutive of many of the works featured in this chapter. Thinking of “you” here takes on a cinematic grammar; the jump cut enacts transitions from the “Buick repairs” to the barren “railroad tracks” and the “bus” stop at “twilight.” Similarly, its setting is shot through with the visuals of pop Americana, broad brushstrokes of the small town and the industrial suggested by these locales. Thinking of “you” also refers back to the movies; the speaker sees “your” face on the “movie magazine,” and in turn a movie still of another star and purveyor of “Song[s],” the teen idol Fabian. This is a poem of absence, one where a person’s presence must be conjured by the verb “to think,” a verb which becomes seemingly interchangeable with “to see,” and in the “right now” of the poem’s iteration, “to hear.” The poem’s “right now” of remembrance begins in the past, and the image of its author walking thus lingers throughout.

And yet the distinction here between “me” and “you” is complicated by the unfolding of the poem’s first three lines. Though the addressee is clearly demarcated, “me” and “you” risk intermixing at the moment the speaker observes that “it was your face I saw on the movie magazine.” Not “I saw your face,” but “it was your face I saw.” This construction inevitably invites consideration of other possibilities—who else’s face might it have been? —and while the poem stages a blurring between the visages of “you” and “Fabian,” it also leaves room for the triangulated possibility of the speaker’s own face reflected back at him. It “was your face I saw,” which is to say, not mine, and the poem has already established in its opening line an act of self-spectatorship conducted through the eyes of “you.” The “me” of this opening line might thus seem like Bersani’s cruising homosexual, who goes “in search of objects that will give him back to himself,” except here he finds instead the resemblance of a lover, who is in turn mediated by a movie star.59 This image of the poet walking calls to mind another memory described by Joe Brainard:

I remember Frank O’Hara’s walk. Light and sassy. With a slight bounce and a slight twist. It was a beautiful walk. Confident. “I don’t care.” And sometimes “I know you are looking.”60

Brainard’s account of O’Hara’s walk weaves verbal statements as accompaniments to motion. It imagines that the particularities of “bounce” and “twist” might be literally expressive, or soundtracked by these competing attitudes which run against each other simultaneously. The speaker of O’Hara’s “Song,” on the surface, seems to lack some of the assurance Brainard suggests was O’Hara’s signature tune; he doesn’t know if you saw him walking, and seems to care if you did. And yet the intricate overlay of address and self-spectatorship in the poem’s first line—with the speaker imagining his own image as witnessed by the person he addresses—suspends the poem’s “me” and “you” in relation to one another and thus trades, like the other “Song,” in an impersonal interpersonality. Such a style, to return to Miller, is thus able to accommodate paradoxes; it seems to hide the person of the poem while simultaneously making him visible, and cognizant of our looking.

As Brian Glavey notes, O’Hara’s disclosures of queerness are often intimately bound up with the visibility of his own image and, in turn, with moments of ekphrasis. Even “Homosexuality,” in a sense his most explicit poetic description of sexual identity, began its life (according to a manuscript note) with the subtitle “Ensor Self-Portrait with Masks,” which refers to a self-portrait by painter James Ensor that featured in a 1951 show at MoMA. Glavey gleans from this that “the poem can be read not only as an exchange between poet and silent interlocutor but also between a viewer and oil painting,” and this “ekphrastic self-portrait [ . . . ] allows him to flirt with disclosure” and to “approach the love that dare not speak its name by striving toward the condition of the visual rather than the verbal.”61 O’Hara’s own manifesto writings imagine the verbal exchange of poetry as a visualized erotic intermingling that Gregory Bredbeck, in a Barthesian reading of the poet’s textual cruising, describes thus: “The poem becomes ‘Lucky Pierre,’ that is, ‘the one in the middle of a threesome.’ [ . . . ] This text, like the middle in a homosexual threesome, is both receptive and piercing; its surface can be abraded, but it can also abrade.”62 And style is frequently the “surface” upon which this exchange takes place, for it is “common sense” that “if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you” (CP, 498). Like many of O’Hara’s quips to this effect, this latter statement is as suggestive as it is silly, a metaphor for form and content that implies the a priori existence of legs and buttocks which nonetheless need the right pants to have desired and desirous effects, and this relation could alternately be phrased as one of style and substance. Many of O’Hara’s poems seem playfully to resist any suggestion of the latter, barely containing a voice that revels in adopting different styles and guises, playing out in that “scene of my selves” from “In Memory of My Feelings” (CP, 252), or amid the wait in “Mayakovsky” for the “catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern” (CP, 202).

O’Hara often outwardly resists notions of sameness, or rather conceives of sameness as serial, such that these “proliferating likenesses might therefore be read as an effort to revise the conditions of gay visibility and legibility.”63 The challenge for the reader of O’Hara, then, becomes one of meeting his look amid replications of the self in the guise of so many images. Indeed, O’Hara’s quip about tight pants lights upon a more particular methodological question about how we are to read his poems, one which speaks to the relation between liveness and its representations. In suggesting the way that content might usurp form—if you want to “go to bed” with someone, you’ll need to take off their pants—this metaphor speaks to the uniquely flirtatious quality of much of his work, which invites us to go beyond the poem in pursuit of Frank O’Hara himself, imagining its creator in the act of, or as the occasion for, composition. Such readerly imaginings can be ephemeral things, corroborated by phantom documents of life and presence. Since his death, scholarship on O’Hara has to greater or lesser degrees been biographically focused, in part because of the myriad names and places interwoven into his writing and in part because of the wealth of anecdotal material about his life and person that has accumulated.

This chapter has drawn upon numerous biographical materials, from published accounts by O’Hara’s friends and lovers to his own letters now stored in archives, and in concluding finds within these poems an analogy for this approach. The stylized life conjured by movies and the everyday life that plays out on the street, for example, exist in a determinate relation, not interchangeable per se, but leaving residues one on the other, hence the conceptions of a walk as cinematic, say, or a real stranger as a projected Brando, and vice versa. Similarly, to read O’Hara is to get in step not just with an imaginary poetic “I” as a theatrical construction but also as a figure in the context of his own time and hour, a conception of the poet that negotiates between these positions and is made up by the numerous descriptions and images of his person that are to hand. O’Hara seems to court this ambivalently; he “celebrates his own desirability, but, seeing himself represented as an object of other’s desire, recognizes that to be figured is to forfeit his self to others, who will make of him what they will—stories, stereotypes, statues.”64 The sense that the poet “know[s]” we are looking is illuminated as “the interplay between self-love and self-loss involved in recognizing oneself represented in the public sphere,” and O’Hara’s poems are texts that simultaneously suggest the live act of performance while offering a picture of the world from which such acts arise (107). The tensions between liveness and representation, mappable onto those between stillness and motion or past and future, do not require resolution into a singularity.

As his poem “You Are Gorgeous and I’m Coming” (CP, 331) attests, such tensions might yield a form of synesthetic simultaneity; a thinking of “sounds as colored,” a “concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion.” This name-check of Rimbaud is less an invocation of that total “dérèglement de tous les sens” [derangement of all the senses] with which the French poet is associated, than it is a gesture to a happily erratic multiplicity, where a state of “obscurity” is also “simple,” where “sounds” might be “colored,” and where a poem to a lover is both still and moving.65 The poem’s composition as an acrostic to Vincent Warren can be illuminated, too, by its final phrase, the “captured time of our being,” where the “captured” fixity of inscription—what’s in a name? —meets the temporal flux of “being.” These lines suggest a work that is both act and portrait, and reveal distinct phenomenological modes in collaboration, states gestured to by that dualism of standing still and walking in New York which lies at the heart of O’Hara’s work. It is not a matter of delineating who is speaking as if it were merely a riddle: “Je est un autre” [I is someone else], as Rimbaud’s “obscurity” has it.66 He can’t be “got at one reading” (“Personism,” CP, 498). What O’Hara shows, in his attractive mystery, is the way that queer self-representation teeters between, and is produced by, the representational poles of “me” and “you,” and the states of inference and intimacy existing between them. In O’Hara, the look is itself an act of becoming; an exchange of one to one performed by a text that is simultaneously solicitous and insouciant, open and closed. It invites us to “go to bed with” it and—well, you know the rest.