Gay Al: "I Am Not OF Society"

[Herbert Spencer]

The pervert and adjudicated civil rights violator admits that he "can't help but see society differently."  He admits that because of his deviant sexual orientation he can't view society the way normal people view it.  Isn't it about time then that society took this degenerate at his word and stopped allowing him to make judgments about normal, non-perverted, non-civil rights violating people?  

Quote:Alan Contreras said...
Thanks, Reginald, for posting this interesting discussion. We look forward to your appearace at the University of Oregon in May.

I am a gay writer who writes poetry, though the great bulk of my writing is prose about higher education issues or ornithology. My poetry is very rarely about what I think of as "gay themes," yet I agree completely with the panelists who correctly perceive that gay writers by definition can't help but see society differently. I am IN society but I am not OF society.

I own every book of poems that J.D. McClatchy and you, Reginald, have published, and also all of Merrill, all of Carl Phillips and some works by Mark Doty. Many of the poems in these collections have a gay theme to them, but many do not.

I don't feel obligated to write about "gay things" because I am a gay person. It seems so cramped to limit oneself that way. Yet most of the panelists speak as though a gay poet has an obligation to focus on gay themes. Why?

February 8, 2008 6:57 PM

http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/200...cs_08.html