Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader
The Gay & Lesbian Review
December 28, 2019
WHEN STEVE ABBOTT drove his VW bug over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco in the summer of 1974, there was a palpable queer energy, like a hot wire, running through the City by the Bay. To paraphrase Andy Warhol when referring to queer sexuality, if you had “a problem,” whether you lived in Augusta or Oshkosh, San Francisco was where you wanted to be. Abbott (1943–1992) had been a prominent Atlanta antiwar and gay activist, a poet, a political cartoonist, and the Gay Lib editor at the legendary underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird.
A year before he moved west with his five-year-old daughter, his wife had been killed in a car accident. When he told her that he was bisexual upon their first meeting at an SDS party, she responded with characteristically ’60s idealism: “That means you can love all of humanity instead of just half of it.” Her death is the subject of Abbott’s richly layered poem “Elegy.” (“Before my wife died, she dreamt of our fishtank breaking & all the fish flopping into the street. No one would help her save them.”)
Beautiful Aliens is a selection of Abbott’s essays, fiction, poems, and poetry cartoons, illustrating Abbott’s creative range and versatility. The book was compiled by Jamie Townsend, a Bay Area genderqueer poet who first encountered Abbott’s work when she was browsing in a bookstore in the Berkshires and picked up a copy of Stretching the Agape Bra, a collection of his poetry that includes “Elegy.”
In 2013, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father was published. In it, Alysia Abbott tells of her father’s troubled, drug-fueled marriage to her mother, his commitment to raising Alysia as a gay single parent, coming out, life as a poet and literary mover and shaker, misguided romances (detailed in his funny/sad piece “The Malcontent”), and drug addiction. She describes their complicated relationship as she was growing up in a Haight-Ashbury apartment, with her father working odd jobs, including sweeping the halls of the building they lived in to pay the rent. She recalls how her father would often take her to readings where she would nuzzle in his lap.
In Beautiful Aliens, Townsend stresses Abbott’s belief in community. Indeed, an important part of his legacy is his tireless support for other poets. He organized countless readings, revived the periodical Poetry Flash, and created and funded the influential literary arts publication Soup, which showcased “New Narrative” gay and lesbian poets such as Bob Gluck, Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, and Kevin Killian. “New Narrative shatters linearity, proceeds by flashes, enigmas. ... Formalisms implode, stagnate. New Narrative explodes, speaking to and creating community,” Abbott wrote.
In a writer’s imagination, community can breach time, blurring past and present, as can be seen in Abbott’s tongue-in-cheek Lives of the Poets, a spoof with a serious edge, a who’s who of literary history that turns biography on its head and provides a fascinating guessing game. It consists of a series of biographical collages, some about the people celebrated in Abbott’s circumscribed sphere, such as poets Judy Grahn and Bob Kaufman (subject of an appreciative essay, “Bob Kaufman: Hidden Master of the Beats”); others universally recognized, such as Samuel Beckett, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sylvia Plath. And there’s a third group: the unrecognized anonymous. “He lay in bed all day with the curtains drawn,” begins one that no doubt refers to Proust, and ends with: “He later became famous for writing about nothing.” In another, about someone unnamed: “A potential new friend doesn’t look gay because his jeans hang low and baggy, but [because] he kisses a sweater he’s just purchased.”
Like his fiction, Abbott’s poetry illustrates the scope of his interests and erudition, and often alludes to queer icons: St. Sebastian, Jean Genet, and the singer Prince among them. Irony is fused with indignation in “To a Soviet Artist in Prison,” dedicated to filmmaker and artist Sergei Parajanov (director of the classic film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). Failing to hew to socialist realism, his work banned, Parajanov was accused of homosexual acts, and in 1973 he was imprisoned. Working with materials he scrounged together, he was somehow able to make small artworks. Abbott’s poem begins: “They tortured me today/when I created/ collage as a degenerate stance.”
While condemning repression, the poem also suggests that the power of a work of art is validated when it’s perceived as a threat (totalitarian Russia), as compared to art that’s tolerated but suffers indifference (the consumerist West): “The corners of my poster/ I tore/ so it would resemble the State/ and I stained it with my own blood/ (for this they hung me by my testicles).” And then the last stanza: “But I was lucky!/ When I crawled back to my cell/ I found this letter from Karl Shapiro./ ‘America made me silky, rich and famous,’/ he wrote,/ ‘But I am dying/ because no one listens to my words.’”
Abbott often uses the essay to call attention to artists he deems under-appreciated, such as the early 20th-century Russian Symbolist novelist Fyodor Sologub and the contemporary singer and performance artist Diamanda Galás. Abbott could be strident, as in his piece “Gay Lit’s Bad Boy,” putting the work of Dennis Cooper, known for the five novels in his “George Miles Cycle,” up against the more mainstream writing of David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes. We get that Cooper’s work, much of which involves sadomasochistic violence, is more outré, but does Leavitt deserve to be dismissed as sentimental and “formulaic”? Is Cooper, as opposed to Leavitt, “spiritually transformative,” as Abbott argues, or is he simply following his interest in obsessively exploring a dark, nihilistic side of life?
Abbott writes, reductively: “I think we must admit that transgressive eroticism constitutes the very essence of gay life (or at least did before AIDS).” He then offers a narrow rationale: “Since we as gays were defined as ‘bad’ to start with, we jumped into the bad with both feet. What other options did we have? Either that or celibacy.” How about the option of not allowing yourself to be defined by cultural bigotry?
Identity as enigma, the Sisyphean quest for a lover, sex, drugs, pain, death, transformation. These themes, handled nimbly and often with biting humor, recur throughout Abbott’s work. He proposes that art and life are dichotomous: “I don’t for a minute believe that Dennis Cooper (or Robert Gluck, William Burroughs, or John Waters for that matter) would literally advocate the extreme behavior their characters indulge in.”
The question of whether art can affect behavior is a perennial one, though it seems naïve to think that it cannot. Abbott quotes Georges Bataille: “With the death of religion, the novel becomes the bloody sacrifice.” Abbott goes on to say: “It’s the same sort of sacrifice ... that Catholics celebrate in their Mass.” In other words, art is a separate stage from human actions. But what about, say, Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (1935), an artistic tour de force that was used as propaganda by the Nazis to fire up the German people?
In fall 1992, Abbott entered San Francisco’s Maitri Hospice, founded by Zen master Issan Dorsey, a former drag queen, as a sanctuary for people with AIDS. In Abbott’s room were a small tin Buddha, a picture of Issan in blue robes, and a photograph of Alysia. He died in December, holding his daughter’s hand and surrounded by friends chanting “We love you Steve.”