And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market– the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched in the footlight glow, their laughter close to […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem,word
Tagged: Death, Herbert Tobias, John Updike, Le Flore, Paris, vintage gay photo, vintage photography
All houses wherein men have lived and died Are haunted houses. Through the open doors The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, With feet that make no sound upon the floors. We meet them at the door-way, on the stair, Along the passages they come and go, Impalpable impressions on the air, A sense of […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem,word
Tagged: gay halloween, ghosts, Halloween, spirits, vintage, vintage gay photo
If he asks about me, trace on the ground a cross of silence and ashes over the impure name that afflicts me. If he asks about me, say that I have died and that I am decaying beneath the ants. Tell him that I am a branch of an orange tree, the simple weather vane […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem,Uncategorized,word
Tagged: bathtub, Emilio Ballagas, gay, man, vintage photo
Many have loved you with lips and fingers And lain with you till the moon went out; Many have brought you lover’s gifts! And some have left their dreams on your doorstep. But I who am youth among your lovers Come like an acolyte to worship, My thirsting blood restrained by reverence, My heart a […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,lesbian,photography,poem,women in love
Tagged: Elsa Gidlow, lesbian poetry, Love's Acolyte, top hat, vintage female affection, vintage photography
What I had wanted was to be chaste, sober and uncomfortable for a sprawling episode on a beach somewhere dirty, perennially out of fashion; let the smell of cocoa butter drive deep memory wild as the sun goes down through a bottle of pop some kid half-left to turn warm in the sand. The train […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem
Tagged: August Kleinzahler, vintage photo
I want to liberate beautiful boys from false ideas about sex. Sex is religious mystical healthy and nutritious. It’s like eating a banana. The Big Banana in the sky. I’d like to peel him and eat him, foreskin and all. Fall on my knees and worship god’s rod. If he’s Jewish or Moslem well eat […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem
Tagged: gay poem, Harold Norse, sailors, The Big Banana, vintage male affection
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet. But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem
Tagged: gay, vintage male affection, vintage photo, Yeats
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning, And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder, And this day draw a veil […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem
Tagged: gay, vintage male affection, William Morris
You and I have so much love That it burns like a fire, In which we bake a lump of clay Moulded into a figure of you And a figure of me. Then we take both of them, And break them into pieces, And mix the pieces with water, And mould again a figure of […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem
Tagged: Kuan Tao-sheng, Married Love, poem, vintage male affection
We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the […]
Categories: gay,imagined histories,photography,poem
Tagged: gay marriage, maya angelou, paper moon, vintage photo
