Rick Whitaker > Quotes

“ForJennyMcPhee
I remember the first time I met Frank O'Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early Spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very theatrical. Decadent. I remember that I liked him instantly.
-Joe Brainard, I Remember”
― Rick Whitaker, The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers

“Was Drake gay? Nobody knows. Was Halleck? Certainly, though it is a matter only for speculation just how aware he was that he was not only unlike the majority of men, but like many others. In a society in which the official punishment for sodomy was death, Halleck was amazingly open about his feelings for Drake and his desire for the intimate company of men. But neither he nor Drake could have had any idea that their blithe poems were the first published expressions in the United States of what would become a long tradition leading eventually to what we think of as a literary gay culture. It's”
― Rick Whitaker, The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers

“A statue of him on Central Park's "Literary Walk" is still today the only representation there of an American writer; it was unveiled in 1877 by President Hayes and a crowd of fifty thousand people. Halleck dined twice with President Jackson; Abraham Lincoln complimented him; and John Quincy Adams referred to his poetry in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. For sixteen years he was "a sort of secretary and companion" to John Jacob Astor, America's richest and best-connected man. Halleck was admired by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and especially Poe.
But by 1930, he was largely forgotten.”
― Rick Whitaker, The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers