Letters first published in Lost and Found’s chapbook: “like a great armful of wild & wonderful flowers”: Selected Letters of Michael Rumaker, edited by Megan Paslawski.
[To Don Allen; November 7, 1979]
Dear Don,
[…] The March on Washington was a real dyke and faggot high! I mean, exuberant, exhilarating, laughing, high high high-spirited gayety! A sober, genuinely happy up up march with hardly a trace of booze or drugs, in mostly sunshine of course (it never rains on our parades, the Goddess is good, the Goddess wants us out there strutting our stuff in broad daylight). A quarter of a million of us (at least)
tho I suspect more. I have never seen so many gay people together in all my life, in all our lives – I’ve seen a hundred thousand of us in Sheep Meadow in Central Park and there were easily 3 to 4 times that many of us in the National Mall in Wash., DC. How we livened up that city of the dead with its marble mausoleums to patriarchy! I’ve written about that day extensively in my journal but just let me say that during the March I encountered Allen G. and Peter O. standing on a corner on 17th St. and we had a nice gab, me thinking how Walt W. would’ve enjoyed it all, especially the lads, so many young and beautiful ones in incredible numbers and all races. AG said he’d received the copy of “Baths” I’d sent him and was “glad to have it,” and said you’d done a fine job on the book. Allen was due to speak and/or read a poem, along with Peter, at 3 pm at the rally, didn’t know what he was going to say yet, “Maybe I’ll write a poem beforehand.” (It was then around 2:30 pm) — anyway, with me in the middle, and Peter taping away, the 3 of us marched arm-in-arm down the rest of the parade route, me reminiscing about how 22 years ago, crossing 6th Ave with the two of them, whom I’d just met (I was staying at Richard Howard’s and Sandy’s on W. 10th, remember? Through your kind introduction), Allen telling me a psychiatrist at PI had said to him “If you’re homosexual be a homosexual, it’s all right” and how he had no trouble with it after that, suggesting it was something I needed to do, too, but of course I wasn’t able to then, it wasn’t my time (some of us need to go longer, more roundabout routes, sometimes there are no shortcuts). But there we were, the survivors, the lucky ones, 3 faggots walking proudly in our middle years, left to bear witness and occasionally lads reaching to take Allen’s hand and speak to him and myself feeling so alive and happy and Ginsberg asking me what he should talk about, I said “fairy power,” meaning all that abundant, extraordinary lesbian and gay power lifting staid old Washington right up by its flat, straight heels, and said to speak of the “curvaceous” (“the what?” Peter asked), and said what true gay is, spiraling in curves, not lines and boxes like the constricting coffins of architecture all along the parade route (however the rumors L’Enfant was a faggot), like the linear heads in real enough but false power that keep us all in line, enslavement emanating from beneath the feet of Seneca under the cold dead dome of the Capitol. A strong womyn presence at the rally, strong speakers, magnificent singers like Meg Christian and Holly Near (no gay male singers at all yet in their league) and when Ray Hill, one of the MCs from Texas, asked the enormous crowd how many had ever been locked up because they were gay, it was amazing the number of hands shot up, most of them men, but some womyn too, my own among them, tears shooting up, surprisingly, into my eyes, I hadn’t expected it, and the sense of solidarity, of communion in the most vital and genuine sense, the cleansing, tho not forgetting of all the ugly incarcerations, none of us must ever forget, in that single moment, lifting my hand among hundreds and hundreds of others in the packed crowd around me, feeling cleansed at last inside, and Holly Near sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” corny yes but it was lovely, moving, and the truth was that for all the tens of thousands of us from every corner of the nation and the world standing on that vast grassy plain, we had all arrived at the other side of the rainbow, had arrived at last, together, intact, in joyous, loud, outspoken celebration, and there’s no going back now, not ever again, because the energy generated there in Wash. that dad began a whole new Gay Day, a return to our origins in liberations and not just rights alone, a wholly new grassroots beginning (as I told the young man interviewing me for Pacific News), marching right out of Wash. and back home again all over the country.
Too much to tell, Don. There’s a taste of it. Maybe someday I’ll get my notes together on all this. But one lovely last note: as my faggot friends and I were heading back to our buses for the trip to NYC, I looked back over my shoulder and told the others to there was a lavender (honest to goddess) sunset; I’m certain a wink of cosmic approval. As I said, old Walt would’ve loved it; I certainly did. And bis spirit, along with all the other dyke and faggot spirits of our forebears, was very much present.
Let me hear any of your news. And also anything word you can pass on re how “Baths” is doing. Near 11 pm and I’m out of words.
Love to you,
Mike
xxx
xxx
[To Merrill Gillespie; November 17, 1955]
264 S 21st St Philly
Dear Merrill,
[… ] The last couple of months at Black Mt’ n were rather sordid. I don’t care to go into the details. I did attempt suicide in a very crude clumsy fashion, slashing my wrists over the hood of Tom’s Buick, but Joe F. came along and caught me at it so here I am. That was the last week of August. I was in bed for a couple of days in a state of utter suspension and despair, and my wrists hurt like hell. Say it was for love or for whatever, the thing driving me was so thick and complicated I don’t know now what exactly it was. But everything crazily enough fused, like a relief, release, doing it, and after was like a healing. I feel so clean and of a single piece. Finally say it was for no specific reason, not even him. Desire is so multiple and complex, a gathering electrifying force composed of many and contrary things, how is one to pick out the initial cause for such an act? Lay it to desire. “There is no end to it,” as somebody said. And it’s true. Like my stories, things gather in me to such a pitch and thickness that l become other in the face of it, and burst and do as it directs, willessly. It’s a release and joy to be so directed, without choice or say in the matter, without conscious quibbling and doubts, because it (whatever IT is) is so positively passional and directional there are, in the instant of its urgings, no two ways about. Tho even in the next instant its promptings may go other, contrary, to its previous directives. It demands obedience – the toughest because we so like to think we are the motivators of our actions and thoughts. Speak to me of your intuitive and you speak sense. Again, the imagination is the last habitable place. And it’s there, in the imagination, the intuitive is rooted. The intellect alone cannot bear fruit, nor form, because intellect is secondary to feeling because prime,. spontaneous feeling is the only way to form, and it is the first egress to art. The head alone doesn’t make it, tho it’s part of it, but not all of it, and is not prime in the doing. And feeling, too, is multiple and knowing this, concerning imagination, desire, and intuition feeling as much as a part of each I say knowing each is so multiple and contrary, things (music, painting, writing) can be left open, and that multiple experience of any given piece of work is only possible thru a prime recognition of many-ness, so that all things are possible and possibilities rich and various, and we get relieved of the popular sickness of set ways, forms, and expectations, and hamstringing dogmas of what a thing ”should” and “must” be — which is tiresome nonsense. Can you imagine such a varied richness in American art? I can, and see it in a handful, the seeds of it. Because so much new material has been opened to us, what each of us has got, and the using of it as we must — so that grand concepts Love, Justice, Hate, Virtue, etc, which most writing took off from before is happily flushed down the drain in the face of each man’s corning to grips with those generalizations particular arid as they strike and move him in himself — so that it can never come out the same way twice, nor stale or as generalization if the guy’s really digging himself. [… ]
xxx
xxx
[To Robert Creeley; October 21, 1960]
Dear Bob
…Tuesday afternoon I went to Scribner’s for the 1st time and met Chas. Scribner III and Donald Hutter and sat in Burroughs Mitchell’s office (my editor) in the exact spot where Max Eastman pummeled Hemingway to the floor, and him, Big Papa, laughing, and saying later, a little paranoid, that he (Eastman) “fought him like a woman.”
Old Max Perkins’ office, little and grubby and dark (on the way out I peeked in the Directors Meeting Room to see the big table Tom Wolfe slept on) — a big window tho in Perkins’ old office overlooking 5th Ave., and Rockefeller Center, good view of the parades — and a board with a row of sharp nails Perkins had put there on the window sill because the pigeons used to gang up so, distracting him, and the pigeons so tough and persistent, the nails were all bent down by their feet and they flock there still, oblivious to anybody’s inventions to keep them away. Bob, you know, how you always dream, well myself, last night, in the bottom of this big cardboard box stuffed with my mss, I found this ledger — on the front of it printed DAY — and it was all written, 1954, by this skinny scared kid from South Jersey, wanting to be a writer, and writing, in this dark brown room in the Village, the ledger’s all about long-legged girls with blond hair and long white coats running for taxicabs, and hungry old drunks in the Bowery and a tired redhaired girl with schoolbooks falling asleep on the subway and the Empire State building all pink at sunset — You know, this skinny shy kid afraid to get into the swim, not knowing how and wanting to, badly — and worst of all to be a writer, dreaming and alone, cut off in the grimy ashcan court of Minetta Lane — So that on Tue. Oct. 18, 1960, 3:30 in the afternoon he goes, 48th and 5th Ave., up in the elevator and steps out — and it’s all old walnut glass enclosed offices· and well-worn shiny leather chairs — and it’s what he always thought about and it’s like what he always thought about — and he’s ushered in, and he sits uneasily in the big chair at his editor’s office, and his mouth is dry and his heart beats fast from fear and excitement — and they ask him questions, about his book, and they speak to him with respect, and his mouth gets drier and he wishes he could have a drink of water, his fingers keep digging at the arms of his chair, because he feels like he is in a temple, the place he’s dreamed of, the impossible doors that are now open to him, where the big boys speak to him, with concern and respect about his work, and he realizes, as he looks from face to face and tries somehow to answer their questions, that he is a writer, and he is what he always dreamed to become, that he is here, in this place, which had always seemed such an impossible place to enter.
And afterwards, walking down 5th Ave. in the dusk, breathing freely again with a sense of release and joy, bouncing against the strutting office girls hurrying off to the subways, wanting to grab one, to fling his arms around her, say, I’m a writer, I’m a writer, I’m a writer — a sort of dance down the avenue, evening coming on, and him staring joyfully into every pretty face and in his heart a silent laughter.
Robert, I have a friend. And his name is Jeremy and he is blond and blue-eyed and slender. And we never stop talking, there’s so much we seem to have to say to each other. We met first at Rockland and we are friends and it’s so good to have a friend. It’s really like we are brothers, and I told him I want him to be my brother, and I can talk to him and be close to him and touch him and not be afraid that it has to be the homosexual thing, that we can be close and be brothers — oh, it may seem strange, I have had 7 brothers, and yet I’ve never had a brother, and it’s good to have a brother. I’m having the childhood I never had — deprived, orphan — I’ve found a brother and we lay, me on the mattress on the floor, him on the spring of the bed, in his two-telephone-booths-wide hotel room up on 76th St., and we talk til dawn — and you get up to get a cigaret or a glass of water at the sink in the corner and looking out the window see the dazzling white light of morning and the downtown RCA Empire State bldgs. — and the bones in your legs crack from laying so long — you bring him water, too, or a cigaret and you sit beside him, your hand resting lightly in his (his hair has the smell of rain) and you talk again – talk of everything, sometimes the tears welling up, and both of you crying for some lost and unfound thing out of the past and for the found thing there in the stillness of that room at dawn; speaking in quiet voices, each of us, close and at rest, and the room growing light with the new day. [… ]