The Politics of Camp: Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery

Abstract

The most important insight into gay self-representation in post-war poetry is provided by David Bergman when he refers to ‘gay egolessness’ as arising from ‘the homosexual’s relationship to society’ and also as ‘one of his tools for dealing with’ that relationship.¹ His exploration of this is especially useful for my purposes because it helps to define, by contrast, the self-image of the heterosexual male. Bergman draws on Nancy Chodorow’s description of straight men as possessing a ‘more emphatic individuation and a more defensive firming of experienced ego boundaries’ which leads to their ‘denial of … connectedness and isolation of affect’.² This helps to explain why straight male poets are so self-assertively preoccupied with the acquisition of a ‘voice’, with stamping their poetic identity everywhere on their language and content. Lowell and Berryman, in particular, are preoccupied throughout their work with twisting the poem into a shape that mirrors them.