My Life In Poetry
By Robert Hodges
Steven Reigns conducted a poetry workshop for seniors at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Twenty-eight gay, lesbian and bisexual seniors joined the group to learn how to write personal poetry, to express themselves in words that made them proud. They are proud of their honesty, their unconventional sexual selves, and how they expressed themselves on paper. Reigns has compiled and edited the results with a portrait photograph of each of them.
Most of the senior poets opened up to the readers, a triumph for people whose personal history started in the closet where keeping things secret dominated their lives, where putting on a good show even with their gay and lesbian friends seemed the best action.
Some poems are anecdotes. One man writes of his first sexual experience with another man in an “hourly rented” room in Manila.
Others are more romantic, in which the sacred and dangerous words “I love you” are spoken. One man recalls exciting sex with his straight friend during his teenage years. He, too, had to pretend he was attracted to women.
A woman recalls her father always angry that she was a tomboy and that her brother was not a “real man.”
Another man writes a pleasant story about a bus tour for seniors. The tour is over, but there is a coda. On the bus back to Los Angeles he meets an attractive young man. Maybe they will have lunch together in a few weeks. The compression of poetry makes these episodes far more effective than attempts at fully detailed prose descriptions.
Sometimes there seemed to be no connection between the poems and the short biographical sketches at the back of the book. The sketches often seemed boastful or artificial, and much of the New Age and “human-potential rhetoric” was unconvincing. Language borrowed from the culture of Indigenous Peoples sounded strained: One poet claimed to be “a gay tribal elder.” Another was a “two-spirit-elder” and another defined herself as a “spiritual warrior.”
However, it’s the book is worth a read for the poems. You likely will be moved.