“Say Your Favorite Poet in the World is Lying There”: Eileen Myles, James Schuyler, and the Queer Intimacies of Care

Abstract

This article closely reads “Chelsea Girls,” an autobiographical short story by Eileen Myles that depicts her experience caring for the diabetic, bipolar poet James Schuyler when she was a young writer getting started in East Village in the late 1970s. Their dependency relationship is a form of queer kinship, an early version of the caring relations between lesbians and gay men that HIV/AIDS would demand over the next two decades as chosen families emerged to nurture gay men and lesbians rejected by their families of origin. The representation of queer kinship offers an alternative to more traditional portrayals of care in literature that focus on the heteronormative family, a site of care that feminist dependency theory also paradoxically privileges. This article synthesizes insights from queer theory and critical disability studies in order to expand our understanding of the roles participants in care can play, the ways they can feel, and the outcomes they can achieve. Myles and Schuyler’s dependency relationship was sustaining for both of them and also critical for her development as a pioneering lesbian poet in an art world still dominated by men.

Endnotes

• ¹ I borrow this term from Margaret Price, who uses it to encompass forms of cognitive difference that have typically been differentiated as “mental illness” and “intellectual disability” (2013, 298-305).

• ² See Munoz 2009, Chisholm 2004, Henderson 2013.

• ³ See, for instance, Kittay and Licia Carlson’s Introduction to Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy (2010, 1-26) and Kittay 2005.

• ⁴ Stacy Clifford Simplican’s model of “complex dependency” seeks to account for relationships in which the recipient of care doesn’t conform to the affective paradigm of dependency theory, particularly when they fail to consistently return the “care, concern and connection” that the dependency worker provides. Taking in the experience of caring for people who display aggression, are not verbally communicative, or not always loving, in complex dependency “dependents find ways to exercise power amid vulnerability” and struggle can often prevail over transparency (2015, 224).

• ⁵ Kelly Fritsch discusses the absence of affect in the attendant services model fo care. While Fritsch’s “intercorporeal” critique of the attendance services model is crucial for re-centering the significance of affect in a caring relation outside of the nuclear family, her use of facilitated sex as a paradigm raises serious concerns around consent, re-privileging mentally non-disabled people as the idealized recipients of care (2010).

• ⁶ See Gould 2009.

• ⁷ Chelsea Girls is the first in a triptych of autobiographical novels including Cool For You (2008) and Inferno (2010).

• ⁸ Myles says of this support network, “I think Jimmy’s combination of real genius and good connections from before and during his disabilities made him sort of uniquely situated. But he was getting support from his own generation, largely, people older than myself so it was already almost historic, that way of life” (Myles, interview with the author, July 31, 2015)

• ⁹ Michael Davidson develops a disability reading of this poetic in On the Outskirts of Form (2009).

• ¹⁰ Myles says of the experience, “There were plenty of books, bookstores, drugs, bodies and like time and space to move everything around and not be living anything that resembled “a mainstream” life. I feel very luck to have experienced that kind of world when I was young and to not get destroyed by it. I had friends on both sides of that equation” (Myles, interview with the author, July 31, 2015).

• ¹¹ See Shulman 1995, Cvetkovich 2003, Gould 2009, and Roach 2012.

• ¹² Myles wrote “Chelsea Girls” as an elegy to Schuyler, who died in 1991.