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Don't Leave Me This Way
A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.
Don’t Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.
Don’t Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.
72 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 8, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 3, 2024
“queer[ing] the sonnet” is in fact my preferred type of literature. ugh. stunning.
for fans of Robert Glück’s About Ed and Kay Gabriel’s work
for fans of Robert Glück’s About Ed and Kay Gabriel’s work
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May 19, 2023Being "about" Gaétan Dugas, the "Patient Zero" and its "ghostly" positionality in relation to contemporary post-AIDS queer life, it got me thinking how different experience of becoming queer has been for those of us who live in non-Western countries. While are all "haunted" by the ghost of Gaétan Dugas through the AIDS pandemic, it makes for quite a different reading and imaginary being removed, temporally and spatially (but also politically and economically), from the whole social context where such bodies, images and texts have been able to circulate to produce Sneathen's poetry. I wanted to write that it makes for a "lateral" reading, but I'm not sure about spatial metaphors in this case, as some pieces of experience can be thought-felt across times and spaces (such as the seropositivity), while others can only be imagined and partially at that (bathhouses and similar venues for queer sociality and desire). More thoughts to come in a review in Serbian at some point.
March 11, 2026
Most poetry goes over my head, but when I started this collection though, I knew I wanted to get it. Sadly, I can’t confidently say that I accomplished this goal, but I can say that I got what I came for in terms of entering the spectral world of shame as it infested an uninhibitedly joyful gay night life in the 1980s.
I paired this poetry collection with Brown’s ingenious novella, Grievers , with the intention of exploring Patient Zero as a literary figure. I didn’t know that Patient Zero is a progression from “Patient O,” with the “O” numerically misremembered for “out-of-California.” When blame inevitably stands in the shadow cast by shame, it’s unsurprisingly that such a thoughtless medical term turned into a witch hunt, tracing innumerable deaths backward until a worthwhile scapegoat was found. Being named patient zero in a pandemic overshadows that singular experience of illness with a retrospective reprimand. I’m grateful for such a well-researched book aimed at exposing the humanity throughout the HIV pandemic, especially its uncertain beginnings. Blame has no place in a life already overflowing with love. Blame has no place in a history of compassion.
——————————————————————————
“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.
“Overjoyed on my hands and knees, a garden, / A slut, a revolution burns against the crown. / Turn over, and keep turning. For my kiss, / I promise to tell of thee like flesh forever.”
“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.”
“The film in the old projector spraying / These images spraying them all over, / My throat around his armpits. My ass / To his shoulders. Swallowing the rhythm / And screwing up the room to hear it. / Let it into him. The voice of somebody / Raised up like his curly brown hair: / A customer in the veil. Let it in. Let it in. / His cozy mustache standing above me. / That sight gets me through the window.”
“Inhibitions / Set aside, a flame gets used to its freedom.”
“I am this group scene, see, / Of throbbing balconies and meat racks. / My life is so very steamy and necessary. / Like long-lost brothers, the clothes piled / Up, rippling and huge, cathedral-like / In parts, they slip back into fornicating. / Yes, I stared at the position of the stars. / And, yes, I endure there. Ain't that a trip?”
“The violence in lesions. Always the lesions / Defiantly staring back at us having such / A good time. Bits blown back and apart. / These men, they might be conspiracies. / They are social venues full of such heat. / The whips, leather hoods, and leashes / Let our hands fall asleep upon the floor. / Breathing and incomplete, we're the light / And danger in the streets. It's fantastic: / That we are only just a hint of ourselves.”
“My shoulder all roomy, emptied out for / This history, though I've never even seen it. / Our scar is so crowded, dulled into vagrants / And criminals. I want them all and I weep. / The heralds and troubadours, they fly so high. / Yes, I dropped semen, but they proved it.”
“I bend my knees to help / Zero in. Zero tingling down into my toes / And scalp. We pass it back and forth, / A dry cough in the Autumn of 1983. / A bigger slut there never was, / Spreading his hairy legs more and more. / I probed the meat with my fingers. I saw /(What's in each booth: bravely, my darling) / You say, I'm going to get less splendid. / I'm going to die in the very home I'm in.”
“A kiss / Is no answer, but a wilderness of hearts. / And fears. What else can I say? A record / Of real beauty lives in that house on fire.”
“Throughout McKay's diligently researched account of Dugas's biography, the voice of the living nevertheless blends with that of the dead to produce somethingnot untrue, not more true but in a particular relation to truth. This is the wager. In order to perceive something of the truth, this alchemy of the voice is necessary, even if it is fraught.”
“More than the historical truth of these men, however, I am interested in the images, echoes, and worlds that cling to their representations.”
“Since being cast as ‘Patient Zero,’ Gaétan Dugas has persisted between and among texts, in an array of representations and fantasies. I wrote this book in order to listen these fantasies. I wanted to hear the clamor of a phantasmic bacchanal echoing in the corridor of an ongoing emergency. Clad in tight jeans and a flannel shirt, it is a fantasy that cruises me under the dim lights of the recent past. I perceive something of its winning smile beaming beneath its full mustache.”
“Like fantasy, the sonnets of Don't Leave Me This Way hover abnormally alongside of, beside, near, in resemblance to, beyond, and apart from Gaétan Dugas and Randy Shilts, but, through their machinations, perhaps, they might meetat least as texts, fantasies, and images, gestures, echoes. That is, yes, as ghosts. May they haunt us with their complexity, fury, sexuality, and unfinished business. May we not leave the ghosts, but find them again and again at odd angles, in strange combinations with the world as know it.”
I paired this poetry collection with Brown’s ingenious novella, Grievers , with the intention of exploring Patient Zero as a literary figure. I didn’t know that Patient Zero is a progression from “Patient O,” with the “O” numerically misremembered for “out-of-California.” When blame inevitably stands in the shadow cast by shame, it’s unsurprisingly that such a thoughtless medical term turned into a witch hunt, tracing innumerable deaths backward until a worthwhile scapegoat was found. Being named patient zero in a pandemic overshadows that singular experience of illness with a retrospective reprimand. I’m grateful for such a well-researched book aimed at exposing the humanity throughout the HIV pandemic, especially its uncertain beginnings. Blame has no place in a life already overflowing with love. Blame has no place in a history of compassion.
——————————————————————————
“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.
“Overjoyed on my hands and knees, a garden, / A slut, a revolution burns against the crown. / Turn over, and keep turning. For my kiss, / I promise to tell of thee like flesh forever.”
“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.”
“The film in the old projector spraying / These images spraying them all over, / My throat around his armpits. My ass / To his shoulders. Swallowing the rhythm / And screwing up the room to hear it. / Let it into him. The voice of somebody / Raised up like his curly brown hair: / A customer in the veil. Let it in. Let it in. / His cozy mustache standing above me. / That sight gets me through the window.”
“Inhibitions / Set aside, a flame gets used to its freedom.”
“I am this group scene, see, / Of throbbing balconies and meat racks. / My life is so very steamy and necessary. / Like long-lost brothers, the clothes piled / Up, rippling and huge, cathedral-like / In parts, they slip back into fornicating. / Yes, I stared at the position of the stars. / And, yes, I endure there. Ain't that a trip?”
“The violence in lesions. Always the lesions / Defiantly staring back at us having such / A good time. Bits blown back and apart. / These men, they might be conspiracies. / They are social venues full of such heat. / The whips, leather hoods, and leashes / Let our hands fall asleep upon the floor. / Breathing and incomplete, we're the light / And danger in the streets. It's fantastic: / That we are only just a hint of ourselves.”
“My shoulder all roomy, emptied out for / This history, though I've never even seen it. / Our scar is so crowded, dulled into vagrants / And criminals. I want them all and I weep. / The heralds and troubadours, they fly so high. / Yes, I dropped semen, but they proved it.”
“I bend my knees to help / Zero in. Zero tingling down into my toes / And scalp. We pass it back and forth, / A dry cough in the Autumn of 1983. / A bigger slut there never was, / Spreading his hairy legs more and more. / I probed the meat with my fingers. I saw /(What's in each booth: bravely, my darling) / You say, I'm going to get less splendid. / I'm going to die in the very home I'm in.”
“A kiss / Is no answer, but a wilderness of hearts. / And fears. What else can I say? A record / Of real beauty lives in that house on fire.”
“Throughout McKay's diligently researched account of Dugas's biography, the voice of the living nevertheless blends with that of the dead to produce somethingnot untrue, not more true but in a particular relation to truth. This is the wager. In order to perceive something of the truth, this alchemy of the voice is necessary, even if it is fraught.”
“More than the historical truth of these men, however, I am interested in the images, echoes, and worlds that cling to their representations.”
“Since being cast as ‘Patient Zero,’ Gaétan Dugas has persisted between and among texts, in an array of representations and fantasies. I wrote this book in order to listen these fantasies. I wanted to hear the clamor of a phantasmic bacchanal echoing in the corridor of an ongoing emergency. Clad in tight jeans and a flannel shirt, it is a fantasy that cruises me under the dim lights of the recent past. I perceive something of its winning smile beaming beneath its full mustache.”
“Like fantasy, the sonnets of Don't Leave Me This Way hover abnormally alongside of, beside, near, in resemblance to, beyond, and apart from Gaétan Dugas and Randy Shilts, but, through their machinations, perhaps, they might meetat least as texts, fantasies, and images, gestures, echoes. That is, yes, as ghosts. May they haunt us with their complexity, fury, sexuality, and unfinished business. May we not leave the ghosts, but find them again and again at odd angles, in strange combinations with the world as know it.”
Read
September 13, 2024In the epilogue the author writes “I wanted to hear the clamor of a phantasmic bacchanal echoing in the corridor of an ongoing emergency” and that is excellently executed. These poems are simultaneously erotic and afflicting, due to what we now know of the AIDS epidemic.
February 28, 2025
Beautifully tender poems that feel alive with each word, each breath and touch lingering after the turn of the page. The connection to The Odyssey through imagery and snippets creates a feeling of myth making, of the inevitable beauty and tragedy of the lives recorded here. Everything recorded here feels so alive, so lived in, it’s hard not to feel the weight of the AIDS Crisis in each line, to feel the shift towards fear and uncertainty and the clamoring for protection and help and the resilience of love and life through it all.
The afterword beautifully ties everything together in the end and bolsters it all as a stunning queer work. The final pages being cut up and recontextualized pieces from an older work on the subject is such a beautiful way to pull history into the present.
The afterword beautifully ties everything together in the end and bolsters it all as a stunning queer work. The final pages being cut up and recontextualized pieces from an older work on the subject is such a beautiful way to pull history into the present.
November 29, 2024
Powerful and punching. 4.5
There's a ridiculous amount of quotable material here so bear with me.
"I too am chasing paper / Towels out here with the living and loving. / Heat's searing. I reach in. Let me have it."
"... I cease to be terrified. / I begin to masturbate these letters. Try to / Catch all the gnats in somebody else's room, / To kiss them tightly. I couldn't, but I want to."
AHHHHHHHHHHHH
There's a ridiculous amount of quotable material here so bear with me.
"I too am chasing paper / Towels out here with the living and loving. / Heat's searing. I reach in. Let me have it."
"... I cease to be terrified. / I begin to masturbate these letters. Try to / Catch all the gnats in somebody else's room, / To kiss them tightly. I couldn't, but I want to."
AHHHHHHHHHHHH
May 4, 2026
if it weren't for the last section describing what the author was inspired by and why he wrote the poems the way he did i wouldn't have loved this as much as i did. i've waited soooo long to get a copy of this to read (shoutout to the queer liberation library) and it was definitely worth picking up.
January 4, 2025
Many of the sonnets didn't resonate with me in as powerful way as some poetry has. What I loved though, is the epilogue or, end where Sneathen explains the purpose and passion behind the poetry and project.
June 29, 2024
I didn’t love these cut-up sonnets, for the most part. But I loved what their author was trying to do with them, and I especially loved his (essentially) afterword about Gaétan Dugas.
January 5, 2025
the archival research in this was so interesting
February 27, 2026
one thing about me is i’m gonna make use of airport/airplane time
March 24, 2026
read this aloud with my bf in one sitting on a cloudy beach day :'(
September 2, 2024
Trying to read more poetry
October 19, 2023
sonnets that queer the form and the subjects. I was appreciating the work but somewhat on the fence until the delirious closer "Bronze Age", which stirred me and the end matter which explained that which had come before. Recommend (but maybe start at the end?)
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews