Thom Gunn spent the summer of 1958 in New York City. ‘It was wonderful, and revelatory as it always is,’ he told his friend Tony White. ‘I learn more about people and myself in NY than anywhere else. I got offered a job in a tough-queer 3rd Avenue bar the day before I left, and if I hadn’t been under contract to Berkeley I’d have accepted it’ (he’d...
Of all the ‘different varieties of New Jerusalem ... I’d only return to one,’ Gunn wrote, ‘For the sexual New Jerusalem was by far the greatest fun.’ ‘He was very interested in sex as a defining thing about the human being,’ his friend Wendy Lesser told me. ‘I never would have said that when he was alive; it wouldn’t have occurred to me. But now that I look at the course of his life, and what sex ended up meaning to him when he was old, it was really central at least to him, his sense of himself, and obviously to his sense of what everyone else was like too.’
