We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Zach Ozma, Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool
Oliver Baez Bendorf, Advantages of Being Evergreen
Reviewed by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
The marble ass that covers the new publication of the diaries of Lou Sullivan, the gay and trans activist and writer who passed away from AIDS complications in 1991, is a useful hint at the person we are about to meet within the book’s pages. Sullivan is the definition of boy-crazy. From his beginnings as a young Christian child ravenously obsessed with the Beatles (“Paul-Ringo-Paul-Ringo they keep bouncing around my head. They’re so perfect […] This is a love so strong and real. Oh, love me, too, anyone”) to the adult cruising San Francisco’s leather bars, Sullivan writes with awe about men and the love men might share. “The beauty of a man loving a man just takes away my breath,” he writes in a late entry.
As hinted by its title, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan is a deeply erotic book. Sullivan’s diaries record in great detail his sexual exploits, romantic infatuations, and complex personal relationships. These reminiscences are written in a style somewhere between childlike giddiness and deft description, where you can sense that Sullivan is turning himself on with every entry he writes. His life and diary are committed to gay sex, seeing in it the embodiment of the challenge and passion of life at the margins. “What has it been about male / male love that has made me desire it so?” Sullivan asks himself in a late entry, “the fact that it didn’t happen—that the two people involved really wanted to be with each other, and that the other person chose to love him […] despite all forces against them, they clung to each other with desire.”
But the sex Sullivan records in these pages is not always so affirming and so brave as he idealizes gay sex to be. Though Sullivan often describes sex as a useful tool towards learning truths about his own manhood, the reader is made painfully aware (more aware, it seems, than Sullivan was at times) of the way sex becomes an obstacle to Sullivan’s becoming. His lovers, especially the “T” who is the last major relationship of his life, often use sex as an arena to debate Sullivan’s transition and to propose certain ideas about how he should embody his gender. It is often saddening and frustrating to read the ways Sullivan’s lovers leverage their own sexual identities against his still-blossoming gender identity, or to read his lovers using sexual pleasure against his plans for transition, as when he writes “[T] said I shouldn’t get the cock operation because I am enjoying my pussy. I agreed and told him what a special person he is.”
This selection of journal entries, which Sullivan always imagined being published, makes for an essential record of the daily frustrations and pleasures of coming into a sense of self. Importantly, it is a useful record of a scene (specifically, 70s and 80s queer San Francisco, both its activist networks and its sexual ones) and a record of how an individual came to understand themselves as an individual within a scene. But at the moment when Sullivan finally holds the most crystal-clear sense of himself, he is diagnosed with HIV. Sullivan has said both in the diaries and in public interviews that his greatest sadness upon diagnosis was fear that his bottom surgery (begun, but not healed properly, in 1986 before diagnosis) would never be fully finished and corrected, as he feared doctors would be unwilling to do surgery on him.
In a book textured by humor, pleasure, ecstasy, giddiness, and sadness, this “final chapter” is obviously dominated by pain. Though his always charming and funny style remains surprisingly present, there is a clear loss of energy and life excitement in this last section, as Sullivan details some of his medical routines, new difficulties, and friends’ deaths. But, at the very least, Sullivan dies having definitively answered major questions about himself that have been puzzled over for the hundreds of pages that make up this selection. He dies, to use his own terms, “finally a MAN!” having fought long and hard for a place in the gay community he has admired since he was a child. It is perhaps this knowledge that lets him write, with characteristic goofiness:
I heard this remark on television tonight and thought it so appropriate, I wish I’d have thought of it myself back in the olden days, when Dad used to ask me, “What’s it all about?” The answer:
You do the hokey-pokey
And you turn yourself around
That’s what it’s all about…
Susan Stryker, in her heartfelt introduction to the selection, is exactly right when she says, “get ready to meet a great soul.” That’s what this book feels like, an opportunity to meet someone great. The sleek editing work by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma, the campy but handsome design by Joel Gregory, and the joint publishing work of Nightboat Books and the now-departed Timeless, Infinite Light, together make that meeting both possible and deeply pleasurable.
We Both Laughed in Pleasure is only half the reason why its co-editor Zach Ozma is having a good year. 2019 has also brought the release of his debut poetry book Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative told in verse through a small group of characters named simply by their roles: “mother,” “father,” “dog,” “boy,” and “i.” Its language is plain and quietly sad, with moments of evocative tension. For these reasons and others, the book’s most obvious ancestor is The Book of Frank (2009) by CA Conrad. Readers familiar with The Book of Frank will recognize its precise mix of melancholy, desire, repulsion, and wonder in Ozma’s poems such as “Garbage Man”:
father accuses mother of an affair with the garbage man
but it’s dog that licks the slime from between
the trash collector’s wicked fingers
Ozma shares with Conrad an ability to make every ingredient of a scene feel confoundingly meaningful, communicative in ways that unsettle rather than answer questions. It’s an ability that makes the formal simplicity of the lines in this queer biography feel resplendent, as Conrad’s sparse free verse did in The Book of Frank.
The narrative seems to tell us how an “i” comes into selfhood in an upbringing with a difficult, distant, and hard-to-read father, and in the aftermath of that father’s suicide. The “dog” overlaps with several of the character’s embodiments, working as a particularly mobile image and emotional site. We get scenes where father becomes dog (“father licks himself clean / father curls up by fire / father crawls under house to die”), or scenes where the “i” becomes dog (“it leaves soft impressions in my fur”). The “dog” might be the comforting companion during grief, or the lived, furry embodiment of grief’s complexity.
In a series of puns on the phrase “good boy,” the “i” and the dog are in some form of allegiance, the phrase marking a category they would both like to belong to, sometimes even do. Becoming “dog” is mapped onto become “man/boy,” so that the struggle over the image of the dog that organizes this book is based in the fact that “father” represents a “garbage man” and a “bad dog” (“we lied and said father doesn’t bite”), while the “i” is struggling to fit into being a “good boy.” But even as I say that, I am aware that there is a kind of stretchiness to the images struggled over in this book, and that such a reading fails to account for all of the textures “dog,” “father,” “boy,” and “i” take up.
Through all this stretchiness, it is clear that Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool is a book about death as an instance for becoming, where becoming might mean something like animalization. Its pages are peppered with transformations:
father’s dog died when i was born
house too small for many pups
dog curled up in mud
became a redwood
i curled up in low pile carpet
became a boy
Without making any guesses as to the timeline of the editing of We Both Laughed in Pleasure and the writing of Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool, it seems to me that Ozma either learned from or appreciates Sullivan’s critical attention to the way events, especially sex and death, catalyze or frustrate the process of personal becoming. While Sullivan’s book is a record of the ordinary, a record of his becoming over time, Ozma’s is a bestiary of the ordinary, somewhere between fairy tale and memoir.
Animalization, becoming, and death as a set of questions for trans life is a problem set encountered in another 2019 poetry collection. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s Advantages of Being Evergreen is a brief collection of woodsy lyrics published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. The book’s central concern seems to be the difficult task of imagining sanctuary for a body heavy with memory, catalyzed into change, and charged with desire:
Earth not even buried
in the earth. So many gay
bodies on fire, offerings to
gods who don’t deserve us,
gods of punishment, gods of plight.
The land in the holler weeps.
Still we dream of sanctuary,
follow a hand-drawn map
up the mountain.
On the quest to “put on a self,” the speaker in Advantages of Being Evergreen takes a deep dive into the ecosystem, looking to nature for a model of self both wild and preservable. Its style is primarily in-line with the contemporary lyric styles that CSUPC has published in recent years, though the book is also populated by some experiments in form. In its sound and its images the book strives for consonance over dissonance, though always upholding “wildness” as a form for life. Baez Bendorf writes: “I inject, grow a beard, bleed a while… I become my wildest self / through make-believe—to the river with this thunderous me[…].”
Rainwater, the river, foxes, and bears all repeatedly appear in these poems in the context of grief, transition, queerness, their presence received with something akin to awe or desirous curiosity. The river is the star of one of the collection’s most impressive poems “River I Dream About.” The poem is a repetitive structure of fragments using the word “river” (“River that curve down a backbone./River through which I particle heat.”), sharing an interest with a few other poems in the collection in a more procedural, patterned, and mechanical language. But the poem, as it continues, breaks its form with the I’s transition to the sentence’s subject, moving away from phrases like “River I dream about” to something like the poem’s final lines: “I will be there, printing textures of rock / on the skin of me, belly down, face down. / My god it is good to be home.” What starts as a kind of scenic and recurrent exploration of a variety of rivers is slowly made into a home by the appearance and the movement of the I within the network of rivers. What the poem slowly builds with this grammatical shift is a sense of belonging, the feeling of one’s body belonging in an environment, and the feeling that one’s body belongs to oneself, wild or otherwise: “river where/my fur belongs to me.”
I recall Lou Sullivan’s journals when reading the closing lines from Baez Bendorf in another standout poem “Who Spit into the Pumpkin, Who They Waiting For”: “What I want from the river is what I always want: / to be held by a stronger thing that, in the end, chooses mercy.” It is the sensitive portrayal of gay desire’s risky tenderness that seems shared between Baez Bendorf and Sullivan. I mean by that both the feeling of the love existing “despite all forces,” to use Sullivan’s words of worship, and the danger always associated with the act of loving men. The erotics in Advantages of Being Evergreen are relatively subtle and smartly written, even when they seem to be the innocent and clumsy desires of summer camp and the wilderness. Gay writing has always been obsessed with how to precisely catch and describe our desires, especially the love and sex that moves through the summer heat. In this ongoing debate, Baez Bendorf has landed somewhere productive. “something happens under the bridge. I come up singing,” he writes in “Who Spit into the Pumpkin, Who They Waiting For.” “something” might be a personal transformation, an interpersonal act of desire, an interpersonal act of violence, or something more mundane, the ambiguity capturing some of the subtle but uncensored description of gay desire. The line’s placement in the middle of a nearly-prosaic stanza makes its central transformation, its “something” that “happens,” feel ordinary, as much a part of the landscape as the eggs, hens, peppers, marjoram, and pumpkin that surround it.
In the connection between desire, the animal, the natural, and trans life, Advantages of Being Evergreen—along with recent books like Ozma’s collection, Chely Lima’s 2017 What the Werewolf Told Them, CA Conrad’s 2014 ECODEVIANCE, and The Criminal: Invisibility of Parallel Forces by Max Wolf Valerio—is not exactly unprecedented. But in Baez Bendorf’s version, this thematic connection is staged, perhaps deceptively, as the connection of all things. He writes of a kind of congregation of “everything under the moon” in a form of relation that is pleasurable, mysterious, and productive. The book’s finish occurs in the great ecstasy of this congregation: “the earth is my home and there is / much to cry about. It always helps / to look up, look all the way up // look up, look up, look up, we look / up, up, up.” The repeated words, along with the mapping of earth/heavens along issues of sanctuary, makes this conclusion the most explicit revelation of the book’s aesthetics of the spiritual.
Baez Bendorf’s book is aesthetically and thematically working over the issue of belonging, a theme Sullivan mapped constantly in journal entries throughout his life. Sullivan felt, by turns, an unprecedented sense of belonging and a confounding sense of exclusion amongst his scene of San Francisco queers. He worshipped gay men’s love, of which he endlessly desired to become a part, but was often reminded (by lovers, by friends) of his difference from the cis gay men that he gave so much care to. The writings of Sullivan, an ancestor for all of contemporary queer community, but especially for trans gay men, clearly offer a set of tools, anxieties, dreams, and desires to the many trans gay talents writing now: Ozma, Baez Bendorf, Stephen Ira, Ely Shipley, Jay Besemer, Ari Banias, to name only a limited few in poetry. In these publication’s coinciding in 2019, this lineage is made resplendently clear.
October 2019