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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Notes from the Bathhouse

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Notes from the Bathhouse.

In 1987, the physician and epidemiologist Dr. Selma Dritz told 60 Minutes about her research into the AIDS crisis. Almost 25,000 people had died in the US alone, and so the CDC was on the hunt for Patient Zero.

Dr. Selma Dritz: It was the whodunit of the century.

Helena de Groot: The CDC investigated, published its report, and that report was included in a tell-all bestseller by a journalist named Randy Shilts.

Randy Shilts: You’ve got to remember at the beginning it was very mysterious. Nobody knew what caused this.

Helena de Groot: But a few years later, researchers found a clue.

Reporter: After months in the field, the CDC detectives came back to San Francisco to Dr. Dritz to report their latest discovery.

Dr. Selma Dritz: Three times with three different AIDS patients, they had them name the same man as their contact, a very handsome airline steward.

Helena de Groot: This “very handsome airline steward” went unnamed in the CDC report, but the journalist Randy Shilts decided to out him as the Canadian national Gaetan Dugas. Dugas by all accounts was handsome, magnetic, outrageous, and in the words of one friend, “always cruising.” Wherever his plane would land, Dugas would hit the town, party, have sex, and that, according to Shilts, was how tens of thousands of men across the US were now dying of AIDS.

But it soon turned out that the whole Patient Zero story was false. Shilts had simply misread the report. Gaetan Dugas had his name cleared. Well, officially. In the public imagination, names are harder to clear. The image of this flamboyant sociopathic party boy was simply too good. 

Gaetan Dugas died in 1984. And for all he’s been written about, he did precious little writing himself—a few postcards at most. So when the poet and queer historian Eric Sneathen got interested in the human being behind the myth, he had to find traces of him in interviews, movie scripts, police reports, manifestos, letters, erotica—anything related to Gaetan Dugas and his time. So Eric Sneathen went to work with these texts, cutting and pasting fragments into poems. The result of this collage work is his latest collection, titled Don’t Leave Me this Way. A warning: the book, as well as our conversation, gets pretty explicit at times. Just so you know.

Alright, when I sat down to talk to Eric, he told me writing the book Don’t Leave Me this Way took about a decade.

Helena de Groot: And was it like a torturous process or, or what was that ten year …

Eric Sneathen: I hope it’s okay to say that it was really difficult. There was a period while I was in graduate school where, you know, I see my peers are publishing books and I’m working on this one. I’m like, why isn’t this coming together more quickly? Like, I’d love to have this out in the world so I could share it with other people. But, you know, this is a book about the AIDS epidemic. And at a certain point, I really had to let that go. And allow the kind of grief that is the center of this book to kind of do its thing. It is a book of elegy and mourning. So, sitting with that, of course, is really difficult.

Helena de Groot: It’s good that you say that, because, like, this book is so riotous also and sort of joyous, but with this really dark edge to it. And I—actually, one of the things that I was thinking was like, how do you go about living without just being furious the whole time? You know?

Eric Sneathen: I love that you bring it to anger, you know, fury and rage and anger. I mean, right, like that is the emotional core of ACT UP, right, is like, united in anger.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Eric Sneathen: It’s very interesting because, you know, that moment doesn’t come around till, let’s say, 1987. And at that point, you know, people had been dying for years. But before that, there’s a lot of fear. And before that, so like, in the early ’70s, early ’80s, right, like you’re just seeing this combination of the kind of riotous joy and liberation, but also the darkness that you referred to earlier. Like, those things are like right there next to each other. And it’s interesting to me to kind of like try to imagine that moment. You know, even as a cis white gay man who is often catered to in queer narratives like, I still have a hard time remembering that—remembering (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) as if I was there, I wasn’t alive yet—but like, I still have a hard time situating myself in that kind of blend.

Helena de Groot: Because when were you born?

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS) It becomes important, right?

Helena de Groot: Right.

Eric Sneathen: Like, I think it’s actually really important. So thanks for asking. I was born in 1984, so I am in my teenage years, mid ’90s. And in a way that seems really unremarkable, but as a queer historian myself, I’m just like, yeah, so that means like, I am growing into myself as a sexual being kind of right at the highest point of mortality during this phase of the epidemic in North America. But also like during this moment of great hope combined with despair around that death. And I do remember just being a teenager and just being like, “I’m going to die from this disease.” Because those are the stories that somehow, even as a teenager, I was absorbing.

Helena de Groot: And do you know when was the earliest instance that you thought, “Oh, these deaths are about me?”

Eric Sneathen: I really appreciate that question, because the answer is no. Like, when is that moment when, you know, news and history and events stop being this external thing and start being attached to like, Oh, this is about who I am and how I speak and how I present myself and the clothes that I wear. You know, not just like I want to have sex with, though as a teenager, it’s more about kissing (LAUGHS) probably than sex.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, totally. (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: But like, yeah, I, I have no origin story for, like, connecting those things. But it became suddenly all about everything that I was and was doing.

Helena de Groot: What I find so interesting about any historical work, you know, excavation, is that like, okay, if you’re a historian whose subject is the Middle Ages or whatever, like, yeah, it’s hard, it was a very different time, very hard to sort of imagine what life was like. But then you look at a period like the ’80s and in some ways it’s not easier, you know? Like you weren’t there, or you were there, but barely. And so I’m wondering, like, in the research for this book, what are some of the ways that you found most helpful to bring that period of the late ’70s to, you know, late ’80s to life?

Eric Sneathen: I mean, the simplest answer is just talking to people. And one of the interesting things is that you sleep with people, and they tell you their stories if you’re willing to listen and hang out for a while afterwards. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: And the stories, of course, are like, “Here’s where I lived and here’s what the city was like.” And I do think it’s especially true of San Francisco that people are always yearning for some kind of like mythical past of this place and the city, whether that’s, like, the joyous times of the ’70s or the cheap rents (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: long gone, you know, like there’s just so many eras for this place that people really have yearned for. And I have enjoyed kind of finding projects, you know, whether it’s this poetry project or working on an ACT UP oral history project I did with the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, of like bringing, you know, sex and history together and finding ways of kind of making sure that they kind of stay entangled and organic in that way.

Helena de Groot: Which is also interesting because I feel like there’s so many books about the AIDS epidemic, but somehow sex is always kind of scrubbed out of them. Or you know what I mean? The contours are there, but it’s not really gone into. So, you know, I’m not trying to judge that, but I was really noticing how different your collection is in keeping those two like, like, you can’t forget, like the one came out of the other, you know?

Eric Sneathen: At least in this story, right? Like, at least around this person of Gaetan Dugas. And the way that the historian and journalist Randy Shilts was thinking about this story. And therefore, like, broadly, nationally, how people were thinking about HIV and AIDS. Of course, there were other groups that were affected and there were groups that were affected more than others, but in this particular story, it’s definitely about a kind of sex that is often scrubbed from the record, like you’re talking about.

Helena de Groot: Right. So, okay, so I want to zoom out a little bit. Can you tell me what life was like for the queer community maybe in San Francisco in the mid ’70s, you know, early ’80s? Like anything that comes to mind that sort of defines that time frame.

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS) So I’m like, okay, so that sounds like a dissertation and a half. That sounds like a ten-week seminar.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: Can I just say some of the things that have attracted me to this period?

Helena de Groot: Yeah!

Eric Sneathen: Kind of like,

Helena de Groot: Absolutely. Make it personal. Always my favorite.

Eric Sneathen: I mean, I guess, like, what I’m attracted to is the fantasy that never existed, but the fantasy that San Francisco for gay people in the ’70s was this kind of utopian place where, you know, people were out, people were making space for themselves, people were gaining political power, people were finding ways to come into coalition. Yes, there were disagreements, but they were hopefully, potentially, like, making community, making art, and making space together. And I think that fantasy has given me a lot of fuel in my imagination as a critic and a historian and a poet. Of course, like, once you pause and really think about it, it was never those things. And that culminates historically, you know, in the murder of Harvey Milk.

(NEWS CLIP PLAYS)

News anchor: In the total confusion after the shooting, the president of the Board of Supervisors, Dianne Feinstein, spoke. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.

(CROWD GASPS; COMMOTION)

Eric Sneathen: And it’s really only presaging the kind of devastation that comes on in the next decade. Obviously, like, Reagan is elected, a Californian, (LAUGHS) and completely changes the country, the world, right as this disease is coming along.

(PRESS CONFERENCE CLIP PLAYS)

Reporter: Does the president have any reaction to the announcement from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic, and over 600 cases? It’s known as gay plague. (BACKGROUND LAUGHTER) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died, and I wonder if the president is aware of it.

Ronald Reagan: I don’t have it, are you—do you?

(BACKGROUND LAUGHTER)

Reporter: You don’t have it, well I’m relieved to hear that part.

Ronald Reagan: Do you? You didn’t answer my question. No, I don’t know a thing about it, Lester.

Reporter: Mr. President, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic?

Ronald Reagan: I don’t think so. There’s been no personal experience here, Lester.

(BACKGROUND CHATTER)

Reporter: No, I mean,

Ronald Reagan: 13:37 Dr.—I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no uh,

(BACKGROUND LAUGHTER)

Ronald Reagan: suffered from AIDS or whatever it is

(BACKGROUND CHATTER)

Background speaker: (INAUDIBLE) Gay plague

Eric Sneathen: It’s hard to imagine such a pivot point, but I feel like we’ve also been living through a few of those recently, of, like, seeing a politician take the national stage and changing this country in ways that were seemingly, quote-unquote “unimaginable” before. And also watching a disease change how we relate to one another and how we prioritize our economy, our families, our values. So, I do think there is a kind of continuity there. One of my research areas has been this group out of the Bay Area called New Narrative. And they start in the late ’70s and continue, you know, to this day, but kind of had their heyday for the next decade or so. And these are writers who, for the most part, are, like, unabashedly queer, who are embracing theory and avant-garde practices, and are trying to constantly put gender and sexuality back into this conversation around avant-garde art, which I also find to kind of be this utopian project. So, you know, the fact that you have New Narrative happening at the same time as you have these different crises unfolding in California and in the Bay Area in particular, that’s another thing that’s really driven my imagination.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. And then before that, so you said, like, you know, it was a fantasy. Like, it never, like, it’s a fantasy that we all like to keep alive, but, you know, it never really was, you know, like, what was true?

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: What was, like, fact, you know, what were some of the cool things that were actually true?

Eric Sneathen: What were some of the cool things that were actually true? I mean, I do think you are making community, you are making a voice. And, you know, you had neighborhoods that were being formed that had the potential to, like, actually protect people. You know, like, “You don’t come to our neighborhood cops and beat us up. You know, we protect ourselves here. We create our own economy here, you know, and we do our best to kind of provide for ourselves.” And I think, you know, around the edges of so many historical narratives, you just hear that there was a spirit of generosity and welcome for some people, right? And you know, what is marring all of that, of course, is white supremacy, racism, sexism, classism. You know, there’s only certain kinds of people who are going to be welcomed into a community. And I think it doesn’t take much digging to kind of find numerous examples of the way that people of color were excluded and trans people were excluded and women were excluded. And so I think that it has made the ’70s a really fraught period to kind of rediscover, even. Like how do we talk about the ’70s when it is such a contradiction, right? Like it is this wonderful moment post Stonewall, when people are out and building power and articulating, sometimes for the first time, you know, their art and their being, while at the same time, like, in articulating those things and expressing themselves, they are doing so through negative definition by saying like, “Well, we are not this, we are not that,” you know, “We are embracing like a white patriarchal tradition,” you know.

Helena de Groot: Totally. And like, how long were people feeling, like, free to express their queer sexuality without being afraid of AIDS?

Eric Sneathen: Well, I mean, the first report comes out in 1981, right? So, like, that’s when there’s like an official record and people know there’s something going around, some kind of, you know, quote-unquote “gay cancer” is being spread and it’s probably transmitted sexually.

Helena de Groot: When did people know that? Because that was not, like, known from the beginning, right?

Eric Sneathen: I think there’s this strange thing that happens, right, where there’s, like, known scientifically and then just like, people are making assumptions, right? And if there is this kind of like disease that is affecting a sexual minority, it stands to reason that sexual activity has something to do with it. And I think that regular people who were plugged in to what was going on made that assumption, whether they knew it scientifically or not. You know, that wouldn’t be known for a while. You know, the virus is not identified for years after that. I think it’s ’83 or ’84 or something like that.

Helena de Groot: Oh wow.

Eric Sneathen: So it just, it takes—and even that is, like, up for debate. Like who discovered it first was at a lab in France or one in the U.S. So I—part of what fascinates me about this history and why there’s whole books out there about Gaetan and Randy Shilts and so many books about this epidemic in general is, like, people continue to debate, just like, the minutia and the timing and the timeline. And that’s all well and good. I think as individuals with an experience of the epidemic, whether that’s lived or historical or imagined, you know, like, some of those things can fall away so that there’s more of an emotional experience.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And over the years of you researching this period, what have you learned that most surprised you?

Eric Sneathen: Just the whole story of Robert Rayford I thought was so fascinating. Robert Rayford was a Black teenager who lived outside of Saint Louis, and he died of a mysterious illness in 1969. And one of the physicians who cared for him kept a sample of his tissue and froze it. And when a test came out for HIV, you know, in the ’80s, she tested it and it tested positive for HIV. Subsequently, the tissue was lost. So there was no way to, like, reconfirm this, but it was just a really fascinating story of just like, you know, HIV was likely circulating much earlier than we think. And it was not, not only, you know, circulating among gay men, white gay men of a particular place, you know, urban centers like San Francisco, L.A., New York. And it really threw a wrench in my understanding of the timeline. And was humbling, right? Like, there’s just so much more to know and so much more to consider about this history.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Especially because, of course, the story that is, that you tell in the book is about a person who was blamed for being the first.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Right? Like Patient Zero.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So can you tell me that story? Can you tell me about Gaetan Dugas? Can you tell me who he was? And just like, whatever you know about him that can sort of paint a picture in our minds.

Eric Sneathen: I mean, there’s a recently published a book called Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic. And the scholar who wrote that book, Richard A. McKay, did an amazing job of, like, reconstructing to the best of his ability, like a biography of Gaetan. And he also reached out to one of his former lovers to get a firsthand account, which is published in the book. And of course, like, we don’t have any, we don’t have large texts from Gaetan to kind of get his firsthand account about his life. There are a few postcards included in that book, but the texts are pretty short. But this account from the lover just makes him seem like he really was such a vibrant person, generous, life of the party. Of course, he was gorgeous.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) and he was a flirt and, you know, had just like a fiery side to him. But I, I really would love it if more people were interested in Gaetan, the historical person. I hope that they would go check out that book by Richard A. McKay, Patient Zero. It offers a really moving portrait of this man.

Helena de Groot: Tell me a little bit more about him. Like, what did he do for a living?

Eric Sneathen: He was a flight attendant from Canada. He grew up, (PAUSES) well, what else do I want to say about Gaetan? I mean, I guess what I would say is like this, here’s one of the struggles that happens in the book, is like, it’s not a biography of this person, and it’s not a reconstruction of his life. It really is me trying to trace all these representations of Gaetan through journalism, film, and these different histories that come out, all of which kind of offer a different portrait of him.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Eric Sneathen: And rather than just kind of reconstructing his biography, which, again, McKay has done so beautifully, I’m just interested in kind of the afterlives of these representations, and just what are we left with,

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Eric Sneathen: given this irreconcilable multiplicity of images.

Helena de Groot: I think the reason I’m asking you is also because, like, you know, to be invested in your project of sort of looking at the different ways in which he has been represented and especially misrepresented, I think that will be more cohesive when people sort of know a little bit more, or like, are grounded a little bit more in like, who this person was.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Does it matter that this person had such and so color hair? No, but it helps paint them in our mind. And then once they are alive in our mind, then we can care about all the ways in which they are represented and misrepresented. And this is why, like, I’m needling a little bit,

Eric Sneathen: Please, yeah.

Helena de Groot: because I think we need to feel more emotionally connected before everything else can evolve from that.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah, I mean, I think that I, I sit with that question (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) again and again.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Eric Sneathen: And I think Gaetan’s story provokes these questions around like, well, what is the individual story? What is the individual life, and why does that story motivate us to care more? Like, why would we care knowing this person’s biography? And I, given the kind of enormity of this crisis and this enormity of this loss, what does it mean to kind of sink down on a single point and kind of say, this is when it begins to matter? I think that’s a question for all of us. And when I began this project, I started with (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) an embarrassing amount of hubris.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: Just like, here’s somebody who’s been erased from the historical record and not given a voice. How can I give him a voice? I know, I will do these cut-ups which will force him to speak because I will take all these different representations and listen for a voice to emerge, and that voice will be his. I felt like he ultimately evaded my grasp, you know? And also, I kind of felt a little, not silly, but I felt like that ended up being the wrong approach or the wrong way to think about what I was doing. It wasn’t giving a voice to somebody who had been silenced. It was something else. And whatever that something else is is what I think I am continuing to describe when I try to describe the work of this book. In terms of Gaetan’s biography, I think I’m really limited in my understanding, period. Like I just have the kind of humble myself and say that. But also just like, what are the angles through which we understand him? If it’s through this scholar’s book, he’s able to kind of reconstruct some of his early life. And again, I would ask people to go there. And then there’s this letter from his former lover. And of course, he doesn’t know him as a child. He knows him as a lover. (LAUGHS) And, you know, I think that kind of also says something about like, when do people become important, you know, and what are the kind of norms we have about biography? I think as queer individuals, you know, expressions of gender and sexuality become especially important, but they also become fraught in all the ways that you mentioned earlier because they become scrubbed for a number of reasons. And we’re seeing that all over the country with these pushes for censorship.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Eric Sneathen: So I know I’m being really evasive, but I’m more just trying to say there are, there are better resources than me, to kind of get those biographical details.

Helena de Groot: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I would like to get to a poem.

Eric Sneathen: Of course.

Helena de Groot: It’s the first poem about Gaetan Dugas.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Or the first poem in which he makes an appearance. It’s the one on page 13, “His Sandy Hair Just So. He’s Inviting Me.”

Eric Sneathen: All right.

(READS POEM)

His Sandy Hair Just So. He’s Inviting Me

Gaetan stripped off his t-shirt and fished

Out the obstacle: his gentle French accent,

The music, the gas was just starting. Gaetan

Like you’ve imagined him, walking backward,

Plunging the deep indigo of two mouths,

Four flanks hypnotically. He has left his face,

His sandy hair just so. He’s inviting me

With a shifting of buttocks. Remember me.

Remember the roil of bathhouse mercury,

The chills. Remember fucking, that shame

And joy must be fucked. Rhythms of disco,

Yes. Yes, all night. He edged me in the sand,

Such an unusual appellation who spread

The door shut. Our summer’s just begun.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I love how you, like, mix images so seamlessly, you know? Like, there’s the buttocks that sort of opens that kind of image in your mind. And then like at the end, “such an unusual appellation who spread the door shut.” (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: So, I don’t know, I thought it was like really funny and super graphic, but I can’t really accuse you of being graphic because were just talking about a door,

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: like, you dirty mind, it’s, it’s what else would it be about, you know?

Eric Sneathen: Oh, I’m so glad that you found humor in that, that’s actually a really, that’s touching, thank you. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Wait, you didn’t mean there to be?

Eric Sneathen: No, I, I think one of the things about this book that’s, again, nominally about AIDS, is, like, it’s bizarre and it’s strange. And like, I think there are more tones in this book than just like, one of sadness. And so to kind of hear you talk about the humor that’s in there is really gratifying.

Helena de Groot: I thought that was so much joy and humor and imagination in the language itself. And of course, you hope as much from a book of poems, right. It is not academic research. This is about language, language is

Eric Sneathen: Thank you, yes.

Helena de Groot: the center character, right.

Eric Sneathen: Right. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And yeah, I just, there’s so many things like what I like about poems, not just yours, many, is the way in which, like, sort of disjointed elements can evoke an image that is very whole. It doesn’t feel disjointed. You know, “his gentle French accent, / The music, the gas was just starting.” There’s so much buildup of this sensuality, you know? “Gaetan / Like you’ve imagined him, walking backward,”—why is “walking backward” so sensual? Why is that? (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: “Plunging the deep indigo of two mouths, / Four flanks hypnotically.” Yeah, it’s just great. And I’m wondering who’s the me.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So, you know, “He’s inviting me / With a shifting of buttocks. Remember me.”

Eric Sneathen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Who’s me?

Eric Sneathen: Well, again, this ends up being the question, right? But I guess, like, the way I describe writing this book is as a project of listening, right? Like, you know, through the cut-up process, I’m bringing together all these different texts, I’m shoving them together, and then I make transcripts from that. I read those transcripts, I pull out chunks of text, and that becomes the poetry. And so, I was coming across all these pronouns. Of course, the I, the me, the you, the he, the they, the we, right? All of these things where those pronouns just became questions. And sometimes even though those “I”s and “me”s could not have been Eric Sneathen, they could not have been me, because none of my text was there, it suddenly felt so personal. Like something is reaching out to me through this procedure, which I feel called to, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Sneathen: And it’s a startling “me”, you know, like, whoa, like, I’m really here on the other side of this historical experience. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: That’s interesting because, like, way at the beginning, when we were talking about your own coming of age and sort of knowing that like, “Oh, this is how I’m going to die,” you know, I mean, knowing, thinking.

Eric Sneathen: Sure.

Helena de Groot: And I wonder if there’s some sort of similar, like, revelation where you’re like, “Oh, it’s not me, because I wasn’t there, but it might as well have been,” you know?

Eric Sneathen: Yeah. Well, in just I feel a responsibility and this is why I’m drawn to history. And this is why, you know, I call myself a historian is because I feel an ethical responsibility to try to remember, even though that remembering is, of course, imperfect and maybe is even more imperfect through poetry. But I feel like, you know, this is, this is the charge of the book is “remember me,” you know? And look backwards, find a mirror, you know, bounce an echo off a wall to kind of figure out where I am and figure out where my story went.

Helena de Groot: That’s so moving about this poem also. It’s so pleading. You know? “Remember me. / Remember the roil of bathhouse mercury, / The chills. Remember fucking, that shame / And joy must be fucked.”

Eric Sneathen: I think one of the experiences I’ve had looking backwards through the ’80s and trying to look over the wall of AIDS as a historian, I think I’m often called to remember this great tragedy and it has a kind of monotony to it. Just grief, just a black hole. And of course, it was those things, but it was also so many other things. And people were fighting for those other things as well. What does it mean to kind of bring that whole complex along with you? Maybe you say something that is disjunctive and nonsensical even, and I think that’s what the cut-ups produce, but in that nonsense, I think you’re getting something truthful also.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, like, I love that you start in elegy. You start with like, “Hey, don’t forget, this is the context of book, we’re remembering those people died. We have to do the remembering for them. That’s my responsibility as an historian.” But then you do go on to dive into this sort of, you know, “What was it like then before everyone knew that they were about to die? And like, what was the joy in the bathhouse and the, you know, what was that like?” So I want to get through another poem.

Eric Sneathen: Of course.

Helena de Groot: And this one is very explicit. It’s the one on page 21: “For Weeks. His Innards Hanging Out of Mine.”

Eric Sneathen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Well, I want to give a little heads up to anyone listening who’s like, I want to, you know, read about sex to a certain extent, but not beyond, you know, then that maybe now is the time to go do something else. And yeah, is there anything that you want to say before you launch into it?

Eric Sneathen: There was a review of my book that came out not too long ago, and they quoted from this poem as an example of bad writing. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Oh, my God.

Eric Sneathen: But they meant it in a positive way, like, these poems verge on bad writing. And I mean, I was totally tickled by that, because I think you look at a lot of the writing from the ’70s, this, like, explicit gay writing that’s coming out for the very first time, to a very limited, specialized market. And a lot of it was not, mm, let’s say, high literature. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Eric Sneathen: You know, people wanted to read about the most explicit things, let’s say. So I think that also is like another tone in this book of just kind of finally getting to say something like that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Because it’s very, it’s, what is the word? It’s very sort of adolescent in a way, right? Like, “Oh, my God, look at me. I can say these words, you know?” (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS) Yes! Yes, exactly. And there’s even a tedium to it. Like, I’m looking through this poem, which is like, oh, there’s, some of the key words in this poem are in the one I just read. And these are not back to back in the collection, but, you know, there are kind of these images and themes that kind of recur throughout the book. And I, yeah, I’m kind of just fascinated by that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, also another thing and I promise I’ll let you go into the poem, but who was it? Was it Keats or Wordsworth who was like, you know that a poem is like emotion recollected in tranquility, right? I feel like—who was it?

Eric Sneathen: (WHISPERS) Wordsworth.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah, I

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS) I’m pretty sure that’s Wordsworth.

Helena de Groot: Wordsworth. Great. You know, what is so funny is, I think, like, okay, fine, that’s like, one way to write a poem or something. This is not how this poem was written. You know what I mean?

Eric Sneathen: No,

Helena de Groot: I mean, I don’t know if you wrote it, but like, whoever wrote the text that you cut up for this was, like,

Eric Sneathen: No. Yes.

Helena de Groot: not waiting for tranquility to set in, you know?

Eric Sneathen: No. Well, and, you know, I, I don’t have a lot of my own words in the kind of source material, but I did go to the local bathhouse in Berkeley, California, Steamworks, and like, was out there roving for, I don’t know, an hour or two. And back then they had these little slips of paper so you could write down people’s phone numbers. And instead of doing that, I was like writing little notes to myself about the experience. And I typed those up and included those, so those were not tranquil moments for me in the bath house (LAUGHS) for sure.

Helena de Groot: Wait, wait, wait, I’m going to have to know a little bit more, like, because I’m not aware with the—I’m not a part of the scene, okay.

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: I don’t know about the bathhouses.

Eric Sneathen: You don’t know about bathhouses.

Helena de Groot: Was it like, is this a place where men go to have sex or am I missing?

Eric Sneathen: Yes, yeah, 24/7.

Helena de Groot: Oh, interesting, 24/7. But there’s like a sort of clubby, kind of like it’s dark and there’s music or, like,

Eric Sneathen: Ohh.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: This is so sweet. See, this is, you know, you think you’re writing your book for a certain audience, and then you, like, somebody reads it and your’e like, Whoa, like, their whole world is opening up here. So, yeah, Steamworks is a gay bathhouse in Berkeley. And, you know, it’s in a, it’s in the warehouse district. So it’s just a mostly, like, long building. There are little, tiny rooms throughout that you can rent. There’s also a locker area. If you don’t feel like getting a room. And you just kind of cruise the area. And you’re like, okay, well, there’s a shower, there’s a Jacuzzi, there’s a steam room. There’s like a full gym, there’s also like a mini labyrinth and play area in the back. So, yeah, you just show up at any time and, you know, see who’s there. Maybe you have sex, (LAUGHS) maybe you just kind of hang out, talk to some people.

Helena de Groot: So there’s no music or there is or like, is it,

Eric Sneathen: Oh, there’s definitely, there’s definitely music. And there was a period where you could listen to like Steamworks radio. And I really enjoyed that experience for a while, because I was listening to Steamworks radio writing these poems, and just being like, “Oh, somewhere else, people are fucking to this music that I’m, like, making my art to.” And so I was communing with these, you know, anonymous fucking figures. I love that. And because we’re talking about houses, like, that’s a big part of this story too, that, the bathhouses of San Francisco were closed in 1984 as a health measure, right? They were like, “Well, this is a sexually transmitted disease among gay men. Where are they congregating? They’re congregating in bathhouses. We need to close them down.” And they did so. But Berkeley, being on the other side of the Bay in a different city, kept Steamworks open. And so when you go to Steamworks now it is this kind of historical reminder in the present of that moment when it’s like, well, you still can access this space in San Francisco of all places. You have to go all the way out to the East Bay and have this experience. And one of the things that makes the bathhouse a bathhouse is the fact that the doors lock. So you have this kind of privacy. And of course, that’s related to intimacy and of course, that’s related to the lyric. But you don’t have that kind of privacy in play spaces in San Francisco. Like you have jerkoff clubs and things like that, but you don’t have the cubicle, you don’t have the room. And the fact that that persists has just continued to fascinate me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like so much of that history seems to be lost or at least interrupted. And here is like a place that has continuously been what it’s been.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah. Yeah. In a way.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. All right. You want to read the poem?

Eric Sneathen: Yeah. So,

(READS POEM)

For Weeks. His Innards Hanging Out of Mine.

Everyone to the fuck scene! Disco beneath

The bar, the soundtrack’s heinous breath.

Pour me that bottom kid from the 1980s

With a dick as big as Finland. Bend over

Beers and a little more of me downstairs.

Another one on the house. Gaetan wants it

Raw. Me: I’ll take his dick, hips, and torso

Long, then luscious. Gaetan told me, so

I’ve come on in. Buzzed down to the floors,

It makes me want boots, a smug little smirk

For weeks. His innards hanging out of mine.

I disco, of course, and I get frisky over here.

Just some teeth biting the very taint of him.

Just my appetite to dazzle the door astray.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. That word “frisky” also made me laugh. It seems so dated, right?

Eric Sneathen: Mm-hmm. “I get frisky over here.” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I mean, I’m not American, I didn’t, you know, English is not my first language, so I might get this totally wrong. But, like, is it anachronistic, “frisky” or no?

Eric Sneathen: Yeah. Who’s talking about getting frisky? It’s just like, it’s just kind of silly, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Eric Sneathen: It feels euphemistic, because it’s not “horny”, you know.

Helena de Groot: No, no, exactly.

Eric Sneathen: It’s like, ooo gettin’ frisky.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Yes!

Eric Sneathen: Your parents could say “frisky”.

Helena de Groot: Right. And then in the same poem, you know, like, “a dick is as big as Finland,” so it’s not like you need the you’ve, you know, you’re like, you’ve given away that privilege out there.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah. Or “teeth biting the very taint of him.” I mean, whoa. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: It’s right there.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about, you know, bad writing, like sex writing, bad writing and good writing, you know?

Eric Sneathen: Great. Please.

Helena de Groot: So can you tell me a little bit about like what you have found in sort of struggling with good and bad writing about sex? Like, are there things you have learned that are just bad? Have you things that you learned that you think are good? And also, what is good and bad even, you know what I mean? Like what’s—who cares? Or do you care? Or like, what is that distinction about? Is that relevant to you? Or just tell me all of your thoughts about. Good or bad writing about sex.

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS) Well, I love the question about good or bad writing in general. I think it’s a, I don’t know, it’s a hugely important question. What do we consider literature to be? What has cultural value and why? Right. Like, those questions about good or bad are so important and ones that clearly we are thinking about in a very broad way right now. And those are, these are actually urgent questions about value. Whose stories matter and why, and how does that kind of connect to different historical and political issues? I think one of my questions about the ’70s is just like, how do you talk about it when it’s full of so much bad writing. And specifically, like, bad gay writing? It’s not like all of it was bad. But I think that people were really in the process of figuring out what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it, because the values were not aligned with the social movements that they were a part of in speaking their truth. You know, “This is my experience,” was not necessarily what was most valuable to the academy, say, or theorists at the time. I think that’s a huge question that I kind of have to put to the side, but it does kind of inform another response, which, I think the good and the bad have their place and both can be highly pleasurable. One of the assignments I have for my students very simply was just like, write the worst poem that you can.

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing.

Eric Sneathen: And then we, we had a competition among my students of who could write the worst poem. And the students had like, for the most part, students did not have a block around writing a bad poem. They knew what made a poem bad. They were happy to share them, and it was a pleasurable experience. There was so much laughter happening. And it incited so much conversation. And so, I do think that, you know, both the good and the bad (LAUGHS) have their place and are worth exploring. I always took sex writing a little too literally in the sense that I was reading, I don’t know if it was in a book by Dodie Bellamy or Kevin Killian, but they recounted how Kathy Acker suggested, like, that she was, like, masturbating while she was writing. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: And so I, I went up to Kevin one day, I was just like, “It’s really hard to do that.” (LAUGHS) And Kevin’s like, “I don’t think she literally did that, Eric.” And I was like, “Oh, oh.” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) That’s amazing. I love that, that you were like, “Look, you know, I’m trying like, I’m trying to get initiated by the experts, but like, it’s not working for me.”

Eric Sneathen: I was trying, I was such a serious apprentice to this group of writers that I was, you know, following their methods. This is what they told us to do.

Helena de Groot: Absolutely. That’s so interesting. And I also, what I found so interesting in your example of like, what you ask students, right, that prompt of like, write the worst poem that you can write and how liberatory that seemed to be for them. You know, no hang ups, no, like, preciousness, you know, and I’m just seeing sort of a parallel with the liberatory drive of, like, people who had been oppressed, people who had been told, “You should be ashamed and you should not talk about who you are,” and you know?

Eric Sneathen: Yes.

Helena de Groot: And that there is this sort of like, “Bah! I’m going to put it all out there and I’m going to not feel ashamed and like, you know, who are you to say that it’s bad or something,” you know? And so, yeah, again, like, as someone who, as yourself, tries to do things seriously and who has, like, read good literature, who knows what is good literature, what did it do for your own sense of liberation, to, like, dive into these texts that were like, bad, you know? (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: (LAUGHS) Well, one of my favorite texts, and the title is escaping me right now, but one of my favorite texts to work with was by a porn star who was writing these stories, erotic stories that incorporated safe sex. And this is not somebody who has an MFA or even a background in writing. Meaning, like he didn’t identify primarily as a writer, but he was there writing these stories to show people, almost empirically, like, condoms can be hot. And like, not having penetrative sex is totally possible as part, within, like a sexually fulfilling life. And so even if I didn’t agree with the writing as having, like, great literary value, like, suddenly it could take on totally different dimensions Like, here’s somebody from the community leading as a sexpert, right, (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Eric Sneathen: as a porn star, saying like, you know, there’s more that we need to do with each other than create great art. We need to show each other through art, you know, that we can change our behaviors or like, that we might want to change our behaviors. So I started to find new things in the writing beyond just the literary value.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah. That’s interesting. That also, like, to sort of focus too narrowly on the literary merit in that context seems almost a little pedantic or something.

Eric Sneathen: Yeah. Well it’s a little, yeah, I, I get really swoony around beautiful writing, of course. Like, I, I feel like that’s, for better or worse, that’s my training as a, as a graduate student. But I think that the question about, like, to what end, you know, arises pretty quickly of just like, why, why make this story about the AIDS epidemic beautiful? Like, and only beautiful. What other kind of purposes, you know, might this work be put to?

Helena de Groot: Uh huh. That is such an interesting question. I mean, do you feel morally conflicted about, like, did you ever rein it in? Were you ever like, “Oh, I made this beautiful? You know what? Let me make it a little uglier because it just doesn’t feel morally right to do that with such a tragic,” you know, period?

Eric Sneathen: I mean, I have two responses to that. Like, one, you asked about the liberatory possibilities of bad writing. And I think like, by focusing on this procedure, I was liberated from having to have an authentic relationship to the lyric voice. Like, this is not me saying all of these things. Here is what I listened to and the here’s what I heard, and here’s me presenting what I heard, not what I wrote and not necessarily what I feel. So that sense of remove was liberating. Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: That’s really beautiful. And at the beginning you said that, you know, I was asking you about kind of how you learned about this period and you said, “Well, you know, when you’re having sex with people and then you sort of hang out afterwards and you ask them, or you’re willing to listen about, to their stories,

Eric Sneathen: Yes.

Helena de Groot: you know, they’ll tell you. What did people say or what was the sort of impression you got?

Eric Sneathen: Yeah, I would say that I’m a person who is interested in intimacy but has no gift for particulars, if that wasn’t already apparent.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Eric Sneathen: And so, I’m always interested to kind of talk to sexual partners about their lives, but I don’t have that steel trap mind to kind of remember these things. But I guess what I appreciate is that other people do, right? And they’re going to be there to kind of remember places that are gone and people, you know, like who they were and what they wore and like, what it was like to be at Cafe Flore, and what it was like to, you know, suddenly come to San Francisco in the ’90s, this fabled place, and. But when I was doing my research around the literature of AIDS from San Francisco, I was really hoping to discover texts that kind of shone a light on different aspects of the history that I just hadn’t found before. And I, I did find some, but then a lot of them just never materialized. Like I have a fantasy that there was like all these books where all these people were talking. And I think what I found in totality was something murkier and more cacophonous, and, and partial. And that really is like the truth of the historical record. It’s not even that, you know, like, there is a totality that’s somehow been wiped away. It’s just kind of like, depending on your access to free time or even just like, did you have the right kind of job (LAUGHS) that allowed you to sit at a desk all day and write the correspondence or write the novel that allowed you to remember?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Eric Sneathen: For a while I was leading the ACT UP oral history project for the GLBT Historical Society. And I think one of the things that I was struck by in kind of listening to those conversations and watching people in real time kind of react to questions was like, it is still alive for people. It is still so present for them, that loss. And we think of this as being somehow distant. You know, 30, 40 years ago. But really, it’s like, those losses have informed these people’s lives. And they sit with them, right next to them all day, you know? And for some people, it’s overwhelming and they have completely withdrawn. And there is just a lot of despair. And I think we can’t be afraid to kind of say that and name that of just like, those deaths and those responses are, are real. And are like a void. They’re something that, there is no answer for. That said, I feel like by showing curiosity and by asking questions, hopefully, you know, with respect, I get to show people that, you know, there’s, there’s futures and there’s audiences, there’s ears. There’s people who are interested in these stories and people who want to find ways of keeping that grief in motion and keeping it useful.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

We talked earlier about anger and fury. And, you know, I think we’re in a moment where we need that anger and we need that fury. And, you know, it is an amalgam of grief stemming back decades, you know, if not longer. But like, we need to harness it and transform it in ways that will allow us to stay alive, protect our friends, make change in the world. And I think for me, like, that process around anger stems from curiosity and stems from developing a historical consciousness and helping people develop that historical consciousness. I hope that that’s what this book can do. Is say, like, individuals, even ones as anonymous and partially known as Gaetan were part of history. You could be part of history, too.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Eric Sneathen is the author of two poetry collections, Snail Poems, from 2016, and Don’t Leave Me This Way, which just came out in August. He also coedited Honey Mine, the selected fictions of one of the writers associated with the New Narrative movement, Camille Roy.

If you want to know more about Gaetan Dugas, who he was, and how the story about him got spun, the book Eric mentioned a few times is titled Patient Zero and The Making of the AIDS Epidemic. And it was written by Richard McKay.

Eric Sneathen is a queer literary historian who works as a Graduate Program Advisor and Coordinator for the University of California, Santa Cruz. And he lives in Alameda.

To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.