GLR May-June 2026

neath Aquila the Eagle and Delphinus the dolphin. Hofmann must feel, if not pleased, at least at home in this period of American imperial expansion, when we can stake claims not only on shithole Venezuela but also on the relatively pristine Greenland. His first book, Second Empire , places the reader in the domain of Napoleon III, the land of ormolu, as An drew Holleran calls it. Yet, Hofmann’s erotic expansions are not without pain. “Back home, the kids were cruel to me,/ when I was happy/ they called me/ a faggot/ to puncture that happi ness.” And later when searching for sex, a would-be trick sees blood from “my ugly sandals” and tells him to go home. Hof mann understands his problem. In “Elegant Perversion,” the concluding poem of The Bronze Arms, he tells us: “I am hungry. I am powerful,/ I am lustful, I am defeated.” We wonder whether, as in ancient Greek tragedy, the hubris of hunger, power, and lust hasn’t set him up for disaster.

There is much that is sad, but little that is cathartic about these defeats, because they are usually “light BDSM dreams” in which there is a “A man carrying a sheep,/ a miser being chas tised,” hardly scenes that purge us of pity and fear. For Hof mann, “To give oneself to a hundred lovers: hard./ To give oneself to one: also hard.” Not joyous, not wonderful, but a hardship to be borne, a misery to be endured. And yet, in “Bot tom’s Dream,” a poem toward the end of A Hundred Lovers, when he sees “my death will be a thin fabric/ [the beloved] kisses me through,” Hofmann turns upon himself. “Fuck. I shouldn’t say that:/ I’m from New Jersey, my dad was an exec utive, my fantasies of violence are trite.” And for once, all the mollycoddling privilege of the poems drains away, and we’re left with a little suburban boy who is just beginning to write. _________________________________________________________________ David Bergman is the poetry editor of this magazine.

The Author Reflects on Blackbird at Forty ARTMEMO

L ARRY D UPLECHAN D ECEMBER 14, 1986, was one of the best nights of my life. A Differ ent Light Bookstore in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles was packed cheek by jowl with old friends and new. We sipped the champagne that my partner and I had supplied, laughed and talked while I signed copies of my second novel, Black bird . I was celebrating a dream come true: I’d been published by St. Martin’s Press, known as a leading purveyor of Serious Gay Fiction, and by Michael Denneny, the senior editor at St. Martin’s, who had shep herded not only Edmund White but also Ntozake Shange, G. Gordon Liddy, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Black Book , which Michael liked to refer to as “The Black Shlong Book.” I felt I had arrived as a writer. There are a few surviving snap shots from that long-ago book launch, and I’m grinning like an idiot in every one. But A Different Light shuttered in 1992, and many of the people then in attendance have since died. Which is only natural: It was forty years ago. The mid-1980s was a unique time in pub lishing: Apparently, some senior editor in New York City started the rumor that seri ous (that is, non-porn) gay fiction was going to be the Next Big Thing in publishing— which, of course, didn’t happen. But there was one brief shining moment when, if you could write a gay novel—something with a beginning, a middle, and an end—it was likely that someone would publish it. Gay publishing was a wide-open territory—so wide open that in 1984, when I mailed the manuscript of my first novel, Eight Days a Week , to St. Martin’s Press, it landed on Denneny’s desk. Conventional wisdom held

this was impossible: an unknown author couldn’t get his book to a major New York publishing house “over the transom,” as they called it. But I didn’t know that. As it turned out, Denneny read my book, but he didn’t publish it. He wrote me what might be the most helpful rejection letter in the history of gay publishing: He told me he’d enjoyed my book but that “nothing much really happens in it.” He suggested I

Mars. I fairly ached for characters more like myself, my generation, my ethnicity. But it took The Lord Won’t Mind to push me over the edge and toward the keyboard. Gordon Merrick’s 1970 New York Times bestseller, a homoerotic fairy tale of two modern-day Prince Charmings who fall in love, presents a gay universe so relentlessly white—the only Black character in the book is the servant who declares that if Peter and

send it to Sasha Alyson, whose Boston-based one man operation did publish Eight Days a Week . What’s more, I now had an “in” at St. Martin’s Press, or so I thought. When I started writing in the mid-’80s, one could actually read all the gay novels then in existence and keep up with the rela tively few new ones pub lished each year. As of 1984, while I hadn’t read all the gay novels then in print, I had read a lot of them: Ed White and An

Charlie truly love each other, “the Lord won’t mind”—that while reading it in 1982 or ’83, I vowed to write the anti- Lord Won’tMind featuring a character like myself. So I created Johnnie Ray Rousseau, a fictional char acter exactly like myself— a small, Black, out gay man with a sassy tongue and a mania for 20th-cen tury American pop culture. I proceeded to scribble into a succession of col lege-ruled spiral-bound notebooks various stories

drew Holleran, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, and Joseph Hansen’s series of Dave Brandstetter murder mysteries. I had come out in 1974 during my freshman year in college (when I’d carried Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner with me like a nun with a prayer book). To my post Stonewall mind, there was an aftertaste of old-school self-loathing in both Baldwin and Hansen. White and Holleran and their Violet Quill cohorts were ten to fifteen years my senior and wrote from and about 1970s New York City, a milieu so different from my own it might as well have been

starring Johnnie, stories based upon my ex periences in high school, in college, and in my early to mid-twenties, when I first fell in love and set up housekeeping with a man. Large pieces of both Eight Days a Week and Blackbird were scrawled in those note books (with some pages tapped out on an IBM Selectric typewriter, starting in 1983— I wouldn’t see a word processor up close until 1984). I knew I would eventually or ganize the various chunks of text into a novel about a Black gay boy in a predomi nantly white Southern California high school, and a novel about struggling in

TheG & LR

50