‘The Letters of Thom Gunn’ as a roadmap to San Francisco’s previous
Thom Gunn had a front row seat for LGBT San Francisco development. The poet graduated from Cambridge, published his first volume of poetry (Fighting Terms) and moved to the United States in 1954. At this point he was already leading as openly gay a life as it was possible at the time. When he moved to the United States, he not only went to Stanford, but followed Mike Kitay, his lifelong partner.
Thom Gunn’s letters, edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer and published by Faber & Faber in March 2021, are both an intimate portrait of the poet and a window into the development of what later became gay and leather culture and the rise the hippies and the drug culture. On the way we are spoiled with Gunn’s encounters with well-known writers such as Paul Bowles, Robert Duncan, William Burroughs, WH Auden and many others.
Cover for the hardcover edition of ‘The Letters of Thom Gunn’
Gunn had an immediate impact when he arrived in Palo Alto. A 1954 letter to actor Tony White mentions the couple Tom and Charlotte Herbold, and a footnote to them tells us:
“Tom and Charlotte Herbold took TG to his first gay bar, the Black Cat in San Francisco. They went with a woman named Mary, TG’s ‘date’. The bar, TG said to Robert Prager, “was a huge revelation for me. Gay bars were fun! Though Mary kept saying,” Those poor men. I feel so sorry for you. “I didn’t feel sorry for you. I could see they were having fun. And I realized I could have fun there too, so I went back there by myself the next night. ‘”
White, whom Gunn knew from Cambridge, was one of Gunn’s frequent correspondents. Gunn’s letters are direct, intimate, and often quite funny. Describing an early drug experience, he tells White in a letter written from Oakland in 1958:
“I forgot to tell you. A few weeks ago I met Paul Bowles, a little (and I think bad) American writer. He looks like a Ponce but doesn’t act like one. And he gave me a mescaline (sic) pill (the results of which are similar to those of hashish (sic) “
The letters portray gay life in the 50s and 60s from Gunn’s international perspective. In a letter from Berlin in 1960 to the British poet and editor John Lehmann, he discusses the difference between European and American gay bars:
“I find queer bars outside America very epizen, very girlish. I think that only in America there are bars exclusively for the butch (as opposed to money-butch). But there are many attractive Germans outside of the bars – I don’t mean directly outside, I mean everywhere. “
A young Oliver Sacks
Wolf in motion
This perspective also shows that what came to be known as “sex tourism” was already in place and sometimes resulted in lifelong friendships. Two letters to Kitay in 1961 are a good example of this. In the first he tells of a meeting at Jack’s on the Waterfront (111 Embarcadero):
“There’s an odd, colossal big London Jew named Wolf, a medical student and friend of Jonathan Miller, who says my poetry changed his life – it got him to buy a bike and wear leather, and so does he tearing around like a whirlwind – and came here to be a doctor because I live here. “
The wolf in question is Oliver Wolf Sacks. Gunn’s lifelong influence on him is undeniable: Sacks titled his 2015 autobiography On The Move: A Life based on Gunn’s 1955 poem “On The Move” about leather boys on motorcycles.
In the second letter, Gunn reveals that his encounter with Sacks wasn’t all literary:
“Yeah, I did it with Wolf, and it wasn’t justifiable as I find him extremely unattractive. Well, not extremely, and some people get crazy about him, but I like something (a) nicer and (b) more But for the first time in my life I did what I think was so wrong, that is, slept with someone because they were so devoted, which I find really immoral, the one form of sexual immorality, but it literally came because of me and brought a bike that he still rides all the time because of me. “
Regardless of the failed sexual encounter, Sacks and Gunn formed a lifelong friendship in which Gunn encouraged Sacks’ writing.
The original stud bar
Pop & Stud
The letters also provide a unique glimpse into the rise of pop culture characters from LGBT culture. In a 1963 letter to Kitay, he discussed going to a concert with Chuck Arnett whose mural in the toolbox would frame the opening pages of the Life magazine article “Homosexuality in America” the following year:
“Yesterday we were at the Hungry Eye with Barbra Streisand, a very lovable singer with a fine manner, who you have probably already heard of. The Tool Box bartender Chuck we dated said it was one of their best nights. He was with her four times. “
Since Gunn was passionate about the nightlife of San Francisco, he covers topics that are not easy to find elsewhere. In a 1966 letter to the literary critic and professor Tony Tanner, he talks about the Capri (1326 Grant):
“We – we all – have found a bar that suits us all, me Mike Don, Bryan and you two too. We’re hiding them from Tom Gee and all. It’s the only truly bisexual bar I’ve ever known and is very wild and delightful as well as being close by – on Grant Avenue. “
The Don mentioned in this letter is Don Doody, whom Gunn met at Gordon’s (840 Sansome) in 1961. Doody was a bartender at Tool Box and later at Stud, where he hosted LSD parties known as Saturnalia, environments designed by Arnett in the late 1960s. He appears prominently in the letters, as in this 1968 letter to Tanner:
“Don did a great job with Stud. There are more murals now, there is dancing and socializing, and it is probably the busiest bar in town. He’s moving to the rooms upstairs (where we stayed your first night, remember) Chuck Arnett and some other nice people. Apparently there are 16 rooms up there! “
Thom Gunn in the 1990s
In another letter from 1968 to Tanner, Gunn describes one of the Saturnalia parties:
“The Stud closed for one night to have a bar party for its 150 closest friends. The place was decorated with polyethylene to look like some sort of Venus Fingal Cave, with flexible stalactites, etc. And everyone including Mike and told me it was the best party they ever went to. One thing that helped was they all got acid, so about 70 of us were on a pretty tough trip. “
For a while, it seems that Stud was Gunn’s favorite pub and he met out of town friends there. In a letter to Tanner from 1970, he relates:
“I met Mark and David Hockney at the stud. They wanted to go to a bunch of new bars that they’d heard about. I said, ‘Oh, these bars are awful, they’re very plastic.’ David Hockney said, ‘But we like plastic.’ “
The content of The Letters of Thom Gunn is far wider than the space here allows for discussion. There is also a wonderful account of Gunn’s literary career (which I barely touched). With the window these letters alone give on gay culture before Stonewall in San Francisco, this book is a treasure and deserves to be read by anyone interested in this era.
Letter books are often difficult to sell to readers because they depend on both the personality of the author and his communication skills. In this way The Letters of Thom Gunn becomes a living success. He was both a charming and humorous letter writer and this book is a pleasure to read.
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