Thom Gunn’s death has long seemed an enigmatic tragedy. In 1992, the poet published The Man with Night Sweats, a remarkable collection that empathetically documented the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. The first-person poems there represented a departure because Gunn had, to that point, typically avoided making confessional work. The book won a host of prizes in England and the United States, and Gunn was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant.
And yet, even as he seemed to be riding a wave of success, Gunn was on a downward spiral that accelerated once he retired from UC Berkeley’s English Department in 1999. The balance of teaching and writing had long kept him grounded, but when he left the classroom, Gunn slowly lost his way. He began to spend much of his time at his favorite Folsom Street bar—the Hole in the Wall—where he pursued sexual encounters with young homeless men addicted to speed.
At first, Gunn used speed himself as a means of heightening the sexual experience, but gradually he became dependent. In 2004, the British-born poet was found dead at the age of 74. A postmortem revealed that Gunn had died of polysubstance abuse, which had likely triggered a heart attack. Methamphetamine, heroin, and alcohol were discovered in his system.
It’s taken 20 years, but with Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life, we now have the first full accounting of this complicated life. Along with The Letters of Thom Gunn (2021), which Nott coedited, the biography is significant because it provides a broad frame that highlights both Gunn’s closest personal relationships and his private struggle with addiction during his final years. Working from diaries, manuscripts, and correspondence, Nott is able to reconstruct not only the poet’s inner sensibility but also the events that inspired many of his poems. Although Nott’s meticulously researched book was completed with the permission of the Gunn estate, it does not read like an authorized biography. Rather, Nott steers clear of hagiography and makes no attempt to shield us from chaotic or unpleasant truths.
For Nott, one event is privileged above all others: the morning in 1944 when the 15-year-old Gunn and his 12-year-old brother discovered the body of their mother just hours after she had committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide (coal gas). She had barricaded the sitting room shut with furniture and left a note to divert her sons. “Don’t try to get in,” it read. “Get Mrs. Stoney, my darlings.”
Reading Nott’s description of the tragedy, there can be no doubt of its profound effect. Gunn defended his mother’s actions: “my brother and I found her body,” he once told an interviewer, “…which was not her fault because she’d barred the doors.” Yet privately, Gunn could not help but feel abandoned by his mother, a towering figure about whom he would write. “I am made by her, and undone,” he closes the poem “My Mother’s Pride.”
It could be argued that Gunn never recovered from the loss of his mother, only came up with various coping strategies. In one diary entry, he vows never to be sad again. The admission underscores a recurring motif in Gunn’s life: to escape grief and trauma in the pursuit of euphoric experiences. Unconsciously speaking, Gunn’s pursuit of what Rimbaud termed “derangement of the senses”—via mind-altering drugs and ecstatic sex—was a way of deflecting buried trauma.
Although Nott centers Gunn’s life—or his psyche—on the suicide of his mother, I don’t want to give the impression that the biography is lugubrious. On the contrary, A Cool Queer Life is, as the title suggests, a celebration of the poet’s exuberant intimate relationships and his singular career. After graduating from Trinity College in 1953, Gunn moved to the United States and settled in the Bay Area, where he received a creative writing scholarship at Stanford University in 1954. His first encounter with San Francisco could be described as love at first sight: he quickly became enamored of the city’s fog, bohemian ambience, and queer subculture. Although he traveled frequently, he never really left again.
Indeed—and although he would probably chafe at the designation—Gunn might be described as San Francisco’s unofficial poet laureate. By my count, he memorialized the city and its inhabitants in more than 60 poems. In “The J Car,” one of his most poignant elegies, the narrator travels to Noe Valley to have lunch with an ex-lover and friend who is losing his sight as he slowly dies of AIDS. The poem is about the visceral experience of loss, and the tragedy of dying before one’s time, but as we read the poem, the solitary journey through the city on a lonely Muni streetcar becomes indelibly etched in the mind.
Nott’s title is catchy if a bit at odds with the circumstances of Gunn’s final days. But that’s a minor quibble, since the most impressive work here involves Nott’s treatment of this material. He provides the essential facts surrounding the death but avoids judging Gunn’s choices or his actions. Instead, Nott wisely lets us decide. In an era when character assassination and cancel culture often muddy the waters of biography and criticism, Nott’s restrained approach is both moving and admirable.•
James Penner is the author of Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture and the editor of Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years.
