Considering Adrienne Rich and the other lesbian writers I've come across (Gertrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Virginia Woolf), I can't help but wonder why gay literature, which includes non-fiction essays, is so female-dominated. There are plenty of brilliant male writers who are gay, but they never seem to explicitly write about homosexuality. Literature that follows a lesbian narrative is a fairly new phenomenon, given that homosexuality was hardly ever discussed in the early nineties, but even in recent years there have been few novels or poems that talk about gay men.
The cause for this could be the relation between the fight for gay rights and the feminist movement. These women are writing for both causes - as a woman and a lesbian, they are doubly disenfranchised, and hence have less to lose. Moreover, lesbians traditionally did not have as much freedom to pursue relationships as gay men did, but neither were they condemned as harshly for doing so - they were viewed to be a less harmful, less significant component of society. Even now, the aggression against gay men is much greater than that against gay women. Majority of the kids who commit suicide after being bullied for their sexual orientation are male; politically, conservatives tend to direct their anti-gay hate towards the men, as can be seen from dumbass churches protesting against gays in the military, or laws forbidding sex between men but not women. Hence, gay male writers may feel like they are up against serious societal animosity should they write about sexual orientation.
Then again, this hostility towards gay men does not deter many of them from rising to prominence in other fields like television or art. I suppose there's the distinction between allowing a gay man to act or write, and portraying a gay character in a movie or book. In the case of novels, I think the homosexual community is definitely under-represented, but I don't understand why there are fewer stories about gay men than there are about lesbians. (In Singapore it's different though, most of the prominent local writers are gay.) Is there something inherently more 'artistic' or appealing about reading lesbian literature? Is the bending of gender roles more interesting from a woman's perspective? I don't think so, and yet I wouldn't know. I wish there was an answer to this, or at least brilliant book about gay men to prove me wrong. You get snatches of a gay man's narrative, undertones of his sexuality (in Tennessee Williams perhaps), but these are rarely brought to light.
Anyway, back to Adrienne Rich. I think this is a very good poem about poetry - her introspection is often acute (see Atlas). The title is interesting!:
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control
A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
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