Self-Made Men

Morgan Meis, in an article on the “Hide/Seek” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, argues that gayness, as an identity category, was in invented in America, and invented by poets, at that. He uses Whitman as a first example:

It is never clear in Whitman exactly how much he is attracted to men as men, and how much he is simply attracted to everyone and everything. Whitman’s sexuality is so overflowing as to be beyond any specific identity. One gets the feeling that Whitman got the same amount of erotic charge rubbing up against things in his kitchen as he did getting close to human beings. That is part of his overall metaphysics of joy and abundance.

But Whitman’s egalitarian eroticism, Meis goes on to suggest, gives way to the self-fashioning of particular identities, in response to the very real demands of social life. Meis examines a portrait of Frank O’Hara by Alice Neel as his first example of a portrait of a gay man as a gay man. He goes on:

Another painting in the show, “Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots” by Larry Rivers, says roughly the same thing, if with a little more attitude. In this painting, Frank is to be found staring out at us with his head cocked slightly to the side, naked, wearing boots. His penis hangs like a warning, neither explicitly erotic nor willing to be ignored. Frank’s penis is telling us, none to subtly, that he, Frank O’Hara, is a man, and that his maleness is an ineradicable function of who he is. Frank is not going to be pushed out of his gender by the fact of being gay. He is a man like any other, and at the very same time he is a man who happens to be gay. Come to think of it, I don’t know of any other human being who could have made that point so forcefully, just by being who they were.