Five Queer writers who have influenced me
Can the spice-rose drip such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf? – H.D., Sea Rose
Happy Pride Month!
Full disclosure: I wasn’t exactly full committed to my first degree, which had the full title of ‘English and American Literature and Creative Writing’ (aka English). The early morning lectures were dry, there was a distinct waft of pretentiousness in certain seminars, and, well, I had other distractions (including student politics, a tumultuous love life, and the emergence of Netflix).
But what I did love, and ended up specialising in, was poetry, both reading it and writing it. Discovering the modernist and postmodernist scene was a game-changer: all those evocative images captured in as few words as possible. And often, these poets were just a little bit Queer.
While I haven’t written poetry for a long time, I always return to the five writers below when I need to punch up my prose descriptions a bit – and just when I want to read something beautiful.
H.D. (1886-1961)
H.D., born Hilda Doolittle, was a bisexual novelist and poet from Pennsylvania. One of the pioneers of Imagism, she is as significant as Gertrude Stein or Ezra Pound, but is often overlooked. H.D. encapsulated her ideas in deliberately succinct, sparse language (often repeated) for maximum impact, such as in ‘Oread’:
Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995)
Best known for her Ripley novels, Highsmith was privately Queer. As someone who is of both Jewish and Black heritage, I’m very aware that Highsmith wouldn’t be my biggest fan (there’s a whole section of her Wikipedia dedicated to her controversial views), but I can’t deny the beauty of passages like this from The Price of Salt:
Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.
Langston Hughes (1901-1967)
Legendary writer Hughes was a civil rights pioneer and while he was intensely private about his sexuality, it’s believed that he may have been gay or asexual (so either way, part of the LGBTQ+ community). ‘Dreams’ is one of his most iconic poems, which, like H.D.’s ‘Oread’ is short but sweet and so evocative:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
This man singlehandedly started my love of New York with his postmodernist poems. A Baltimore native, O’Hara was gay and he dedicated some of his poems to his longtime boyfriend (‘Having a Coke With You’ is particularly beautiful). ‘A Step Away from Them’ was the first O’Hara poem I read and there’s a ‘The Waste Land’ quality to it as he meanders through the city – this is the beginning:
It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
While Woolf’s marriage to Leonard was solid, she had many affairs with women (the most famous being, of course, Vita Sackville-West). My personal favourite of Woolf’s is Orlando, the revolutionary, century-spanning, gender-exploring novel inspired by Vita.
However, when I want something to really luxuriate in, I sink into the stream of consciousness of Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse or The Waves. Take this from To the Lighthouse, for example:
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
Modernist imagery and Coldharbour
As I said, these writers’ works have had a considerable impact on my own stylistic preferences, as seen in the end of Coldharbour Chapter One:
The promenade was darkening, street lights slicing through shadows as Alex yanked her suitcase up the street, wheels clicking as her sneakers clacked on the cracked tarmac. This was too much already, she thought, as adrenaline, indignation, and something else that she refused to even entertain surged through her, and she was halfway up Hangman’s Hill when she discovered that she finally felt alive again.
Alive again with Power in her blood and a name sounding through her soul like that cathedral clock chiming out six in the distance:
Elizabeth.
