Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life

By Michael Nott

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

Michael Nott, one of the editors of 2022’s monumental 1100-page collection of the great poet Thom Gunn’s letters, has now produced a massive 700-page biography of Gunn, with six pages of acknowledgements thanking virtually everybody who ever knew the poet, bibliography of two dozen pages that’s loaded with primary sources, and 120 pages of endnotes, many of which expand into mini-discussions. It’s difficult to imagine a future biography of Gunn that will be better documented than this one. Certainly every future biography will need to study this one before it does anything else.

Gunn’s story is meticulously told, from his birth, upbringing, and education in England to his journey to America, stint teaching at Stanford, and deep dive into the sex- and drug-soaked demimonde of San Francisco, and teaching poetry at UC Berkeley during the signpost years of the 1960s. Through all those years, Gunn was talking endlessly, corresponding voluminously, as Nott helped to chronicle in that enormous letter collection, having amusement parks full of raunchy sex, and ingesting a mind-boggling amount of drugs. 

And he kept writing, which Nott likewise inventories in almost finicky detail. Readers see each work as it condenses out of Gunn’s imagination, onto the page in fitful drafts, and finally out into the world, whose reactions are likewise thoroughly noted in these pages. The writing most famously extended to the grim initial years of the AIDS epidemic. “I know a lot of people who have died of AIDS,” Gunn reflected at the time. “As everybody says, it is like the Plague – you don’t know who is going to get it next but it’s going to get a lot more people before it is finished.” As his friends were dying, as he himself was mostly expecting to die, he responded, famously, with 1992’s The Man with Night Sweats, but reading Nott’s book gives the strong and natural impression that AIDS never quite completely left the poet’s mind between those years and his death in 2004.

It’s hundreds of pages of drugs and boys. Nott has chronicled as much of it as can be chronicled, from major loves like Mike Kitay to later fascinations like Charlie Hinkle, who captivates Gunn immediately (“We go to Stables, a very sleazy empty bar nowadays, & have a hugely good time. We eat after Orphan Andy’s, come home, have sex, hug all night”) and is one of the many people he’ll lose to AIDS (after leaving a mostly blind and clearly failing Hinkle in one scene, Gunn recalls, “I leave, look at the young moon, the beauty of physical things, and think of what he will be losing” – not about what Gunn himself will be losing, but what Hinkle will be losing by leaving the world so early). And as much as he’s able, Nott also canvasses the reactions of other people to Gunn. When the poet sees his friend Steven Fritsch Rudser walking along the street with his four-year-old adopted son, Nott shifts to Rudser’s thoughts about Gunn: “People talk about his poetry being a formal expression of dirty things, of drugs and sex and all that kind of stuff,” Rudser later wrote. “That’s true: even though he was into leather sex and bondage and whatever, he was really personable, and he was one of those people who, in my interactions with him, I always felt better after I talked with him for a couple minutes.”

Gunn’s last volume of poetry was 2000’s Boss Cupid, from whose epigraph Nott draws the title of this big biography. “Thom knew that his writing life was coming to an end,” readers are told. “He must also have known, on some level, that his pursuit of desire, already obsessive, would come to push family and poetry to the fringes of his life.” But even in the book’s final pages, although family and poetry might be feeling a bit marginalized, friends, former students, transient lovers, and casual housemates still fill the story right to the end, when Gunn was found dead in his bedroom. 

As one of the many people commenting on his life mentions, Gunn’s life was characterized by “a square facing of the abyss,” and readers of A Cool Queer Life will get all the bone and tissue of that square facing but no hot blood, and certainly none of the abyss itself. It’s at times remarkable how scrupulously Nott absents himself from his own narrative. Gunn had a running simmer of irritation over what he viewed as the book-chat world’s facile commentary on most of his work, but since he was vain, this was in large part a pose; he might well have been irked by how little Nott opines about what he’s describing. 

Fortunately, the danger of this approach, expository boredom, is unthinkable when dealing with Thom Gunn’s life. Nott imports all the best bits of Gunn’s endless, merciless, often beautiful observations about every aspect of his life, and as noted, he widely quotes the comments of others as they were baffled by Gunn, enlightened by him, thrilled by him, or embraced by him. The result is the first genuine page-turner of a long biography in 2024. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News