GLR July-August 2024

thirties after visiting an aunt afflicted with alcoholism. Sobriety costs him his marriage, but Wallace remains on good terms with his wife and children, and he begins to get noticed for his writ ing—first on blogs, then for profiles in established publications. The writer is an intellectual who immerses himself in music. “The Bread,” for example, finds the writer baking a loaf while reading the letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, as the album Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants” (1979) pulses in the background. “The Sex” and “The Touch” reveal more intimate adven tures. In the first story, the author is “driving through SoCal with the top down,” on assignment for an interview. With time to spare, he has signed up for a Grindr hookup at a “gas station on the corner of Vine and Santa Monica,” where his date turns out to be in his fifties and wearing a stained shirt over tearaway warmup pants. The pants add sly humor to the episode, which ends with furtive sex abruptly interrupted when an SUV pulls up and disgorges an entire family, right next to Wallace’s car. In “The Touch” the author recounts the thrill of being in vited to a “queer and trans sex party” for people of color. Pressing his face close to another’s, he feels a sense of con nection—but insists the exchange is not sexual. “A spirit? An essence? Hard to say,” he muses. “Maybe they just become a human in precisely the same way that you are human without the tiniest shard of separation between you ... [and] your lips are not against their lips but against the eidolon of all of their being. ... It’s the kind of thing where if you don’t pay close at tention, you might miss it entirely. That moment ... is another word for love.”

whom died at a young age. Does a short life become a factor when you write a biography? BG: Interesting. The three you mention were all also very driven by the idea of early death. Frank O’Hara was, for no obvi ous reason. Keith was also, and then it be comes verified with his AIDS diagnosis; and Flannery O’Connor had lupus. So they were all in a kind of overdrive and trying to pack a lot of life and work into a shorter time. As for Keith’s early years, biographers kind of have to believe that Wordsworth line—“the child is father to the man,” that there’s this connection between childhood and one’s later years. With Keith, his Jesus Freak period, his love of the Monkees and his Grateful Deadhead period and his taking acid make a lot of sense in setting up the later Keith Haring. And his father, as an am ateur cartoonist, had as much influence on him, as did Picasso and Walt Disney. CP: There’s a big retrospective of Haring’s art that started at the Broad in Los Angeles in 2023 and is at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through September before going to Japan. And a major catalog. Are we having a “Keith Haring moment” in terms of his sometimes wobbly reputation

among critics? BG: It’s interesting to see Keith’s work now in a museum like the Broad. You realize his work is ready for renewal and reappraisal. The work definitely is trying to speak to us and has this kind of fresh surface to it, like it could have been done last night. CP: It was still early in your writing career when you went from fiction to biography. Why the switch? BG: I guess I was seduced by biography. I probably have a certain amount of genre ADD. I’ve done short stories, novels, mem oirs. What’s satisfying and thrilling about biography is that it’s this kind of Gesamtkunstwerk , like a 19th-century novel in that it can go from birth to death and has this narrative pull. That’s something that I really like about it. I always see biographies as novels. CP: Novels with a ton of research. You in terviewed 200 people for the Keith Haring book, for example, and spent six years on it. BG: Yeah, I talked to Edmund White about biographies. His thing is, it’s just too much work. I don’t think he’ll be doing another one again or any time soon. Biographers are always kind of self-deprecatory about the amount of labor that goes into this and the

sort of limited ego of it, because you’re dealing with this figure other than yourself. I do all the research myself. I can’t say I enjoy footnotes and so on, but I do like the thrill of facts , pinning things down to actual reportage. You have to have a vision of it that connects to literature. CP: How did you choose Frank O’Hara as the subject of your first biography? BG: Frank O’Hara was like half in my world. There were a few reasons that I came to write that book, which seemed like a head scratcher to people when I started it—I mean, biography wasn’t a respected form at all in the ’80s. Frank O’Hara wasn’t really well known as a poet, and poets weren’t that valued. But I studied with [fellow New York School poet] Kenneth Koch at Colum bia. And I had fallen in luckily to this crowd that included John Ashbery. And then my first boyfriend was J. J. Mitchell, who had been Frank’s last boyfriend. There are all these kinds of connections, and I heard all these Frank O’Hara stories at dinner. Be tween the poetry and the life stories and im pact on these people—I thought this is very powerful. Claude Peck is a writer and editor who lives in Minneapolis and Palm Springs.

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