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Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life
A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker ).
Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death.
Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic , the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn , draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself.
Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.
Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death.
Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic , the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn , draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself.
Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.
- GenresBiography
720 pages, Hardcover
Published June 18, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 25, 2024
Thanks to NetGalley for getting me this arc. I was fully absorbed by this biography and was devastated, delighted, and deeply moved by it. A must read for 2024!
February 13, 2025
As an American, I had never heard of British-born poet, Thom Gunn, but I was intrigued by the cover (dig those shades reflecting the half-naked photographer) and so bought the book. Almost expecting to lose interest, I, instead, read right to the end (not including Notes, egad) about this transplant to San Francisco. I am now looking forward to locating and reading Gunn’s published works with a certain understanding.
The key to getting at the core of Gunn’s life may be that his mother committed suicide when he was a child, and he never really recovered from it. He continued to ruminate over her death, and the topic dominated, at times, his poetry. But as one comes to understand, writing fine poetry (to him, not necessarily editors) helped him to understand all the important elements of his life, including this loss.
In one sense, Gunn was successful from the start, the Cambridge graduate placing poems in small journals in London as a young man. Though critical success was important to him, he seemed to be one of those rare artists who could analyze his own work and see what was needed—hardly ever following all the invited advice his (critical) readers would bestow upon him. From the beginning there was tension between how much he would reveal about being gay (many times his only subject matter) and being more veiled about it. Until, that is, he moved to the United States. At any rate, Gunn came to define (with the help of W. H. Auden and John Garrett) poetry as “memorable speech” (42). He never lost sight of that goal—leaving and returning to individual poems, sometimes for years, until they seemed memorable.
Gunn lived a lively and unconventional life, even for an out gay man in the 1950s and beyond. He met Mike Kitay when they were both in their early twenties, and they remained together—in one way or another—for the rest of Thom’s life (dying at age 74). Through teaching and lecturing events, as well as grants, Gunn cobbled together a decent living and bought a house in San Francisco. There he and Mike established a commune of sorts, calling the gathered people their family. It was a good and healthful atmosphere, in the main, because none of them had strong relations with or support from their families.
Nott’s book goes into great detail about Gunn’s drug use. For many years Gunn perhaps kept it under control, mixing but also rotating his heavy use of alcohol, speed, and sometimes heroin. And he managed to keep, until the end, his body in good physical shape—trying to maintain his attractive looks for tricks. But as he retired, giving up both writing and teaching (and purpose), his drug use became much heavier, and an overdose ultimately occurred, ending his life in 2004. As literary biography goes (and it can get a bit into the weeds), this one is very fine, I think. Nott fully researches all aspects of Gunn’s life with great detail and understanding, bringing to light the most important elements of a poet’s life. And yet one also understands the poet as a human being, a very generous and kind man at that.
The key to getting at the core of Gunn’s life may be that his mother committed suicide when he was a child, and he never really recovered from it. He continued to ruminate over her death, and the topic dominated, at times, his poetry. But as one comes to understand, writing fine poetry (to him, not necessarily editors) helped him to understand all the important elements of his life, including this loss.
In one sense, Gunn was successful from the start, the Cambridge graduate placing poems in small journals in London as a young man. Though critical success was important to him, he seemed to be one of those rare artists who could analyze his own work and see what was needed—hardly ever following all the invited advice his (critical) readers would bestow upon him. From the beginning there was tension between how much he would reveal about being gay (many times his only subject matter) and being more veiled about it. Until, that is, he moved to the United States. At any rate, Gunn came to define (with the help of W. H. Auden and John Garrett) poetry as “memorable speech” (42). He never lost sight of that goal—leaving and returning to individual poems, sometimes for years, until they seemed memorable.
Gunn lived a lively and unconventional life, even for an out gay man in the 1950s and beyond. He met Mike Kitay when they were both in their early twenties, and they remained together—in one way or another—for the rest of Thom’s life (dying at age 74). Through teaching and lecturing events, as well as grants, Gunn cobbled together a decent living and bought a house in San Francisco. There he and Mike established a commune of sorts, calling the gathered people their family. It was a good and healthful atmosphere, in the main, because none of them had strong relations with or support from their families.
Nott’s book goes into great detail about Gunn’s drug use. For many years Gunn perhaps kept it under control, mixing but also rotating his heavy use of alcohol, speed, and sometimes heroin. And he managed to keep, until the end, his body in good physical shape—trying to maintain his attractive looks for tricks. But as he retired, giving up both writing and teaching (and purpose), his drug use became much heavier, and an overdose ultimately occurred, ending his life in 2004. As literary biography goes (and it can get a bit into the weeds), this one is very fine, I think. Nott fully researches all aspects of Gunn’s life with great detail and understanding, bringing to light the most important elements of a poet’s life. And yet one also understands the poet as a human being, a very generous and kind man at that.
September 4, 2024
This achieves something no author biography I've read has managed before: it becomes, as Gunn's life moves to its end, a (gripping, heart-rending) tale without a foregone conclusion.
It might not be fair to say that Gunn's death was shrouded in mystery: certainly I remember, when I first picked up his Selected Poems, that his biography said he died of "heart failure". It was years later that Jeremy Reed, performing an essay he'd written on Gunn, mentioned that this heart failure came about from a drug overdose. And whether it was suicide or an accident certainly seemed a mystery in the murky web pages I crawled through as a student back then, newly alive to Gunn's poetry.
Nott's job, then, is to bring us to Gunn's inevitable end without sensationalising or glamorising the world of sex, drink, drugs and sleaze that fed Gunn's life and work, that gave him images from which to sketch out his philosophies, and were to play some part - still to many readers undefined - in his death.
But to begin at the beginning: Nott starts not quite as you'd expect. The inevitable, traditional chapters about Gunn's parents, the class and condition he was born into, the circumstances that shaped them and created the influences they had on him, are all present, as is the requisite confusing childhood of stops and starts for so many childhoods - except Nott begins in flash-forward, with the suicide of Gunn's mother when he was fifteen. It's this that Nott chooses to shape Gunn around psychologically: as a young semi-sensitive gay boy with an overly-close maternal bond (astonishingly, Nott reveals that for a while they slept in the same bed, and Gunn states at one point that they "were lovers", in a non-sexual form) who, upon having this ripped from him, develops a need to mother others while also seeking the destructive, suicide-like thrill of drugs and sex. He loves masculinity, and cultivates a more macho persona, but in never quite dealing with his mother's death, something remains a little broken, or unfixed within him.
Gunn journeys through school, national service, and Cambridge University, in chapters that have the usual baggy episodic shape, as Nott tries to show a poetic sensibility forming alongside an existential philosophy. I don't know if he's always successful here, and I did think some of the sources of that philosophy are a little on the thin side -- we're expected to just sort of accept his great friend Tony White as both source and embodiment of this influence in Gunn's early volumes.
The middle of Gunn's life, after meeting Mike Kitay and moving to America, where he begins to break away from his original influences (both formal and philosophical) and cultivate a looser, crunchier poetry that has one foot in the head shops of the Haight-Ashbury, is the most serviceable part of the book. It is at its best when exploring Gunn's unconventional relationship setup with Mike Kitay. When I read Gunn's letters last year, I felt bad for Kitay, with Gunn rejecting the monogamous love he sought and neither letting him stay or go, but here, there's a good few years where Kitay comes across as a bit of a pill, and exhausting to be around - though when you pull back and think of Gunn's need to create a new "family" without mothers or fathers, connected instead by sex and friendship, you do see the attractiveness and the frustrations of having another's beliefs thrust onto you.
It's the last quarter of the book, however - Gunn's final decade - where Nott really shines. After the career high of 'The Man with Night Sweats', Gunn is lauded, feted, garlanded and moneyed - just as he enters retirement. Nott weaves in the slow escalation of drug use, the physical and mental decline, the dissipating creative energy and depression this results in, so so skilfully, through little incidents and observations from others. It builds and builds. Gunn's San Francisco family - Kitay and two men who he'd been in relationships with alongside Gunn - feel like characters in a novel. I wanted to scream at them to help him, to do more; as he toys with speed and crystal, as he begins injecting and hallucinating, the drama feels inevitable and yet as if a missing piece could slot into the mechanism of Gunn's life and steer it to safety. I was bereft when he died, though I'd known it was coming.
Gunn was a deliberately restrained, unemotional writer, and he seems to have lived that way as well -- at times Nott struggles with analysis or statement-making because there simply isn't the source material to say exactly how badly Gunn suffered after his mother's death, or how much this influenced certain life decisions. Personally I wonder how much it impacted his misogyny, and whether the fact of him having so few female friends resulted in his decline: his friendships and relationships were so centred on sex, on good looks and virility (his own, others') that you wonder if a few friendships without a sexual undertow might have helped before he got old and despondent about how "nobody fucks old gays".
Lacking this, the book sometimes feels under-analysed, and sometimes over-analytical on not enough evidence. But Nott makes up for it in how closely and sensitively he uses Gunn's diaries and notebooks to construct a journey of self, of development, and to trace Gunn's changing psychology. It's wonderful to get glimpses of drafts and abandoned poems, to see what Gunn confessed to himself and what ideas or feelings he moved through as he worked - the section on 'Moly' especially.
I don't think this book is really for the casual reader, for those who know some of Gunn's more anthlogised poems (the way the Jonathan Bates Ted Hughes biog was absolutely for those who knew him from A Level English and Sylvia Plath drama) but as the length of this review shows, I'm not one when it comes to Gunn. It's the book Gunn deserves, I think, and a big satisfying read for fans like me who wanted to get closer to the man whose poetry worked so hard to keep us at a distance.
It might not be fair to say that Gunn's death was shrouded in mystery: certainly I remember, when I first picked up his Selected Poems, that his biography said he died of "heart failure". It was years later that Jeremy Reed, performing an essay he'd written on Gunn, mentioned that this heart failure came about from a drug overdose. And whether it was suicide or an accident certainly seemed a mystery in the murky web pages I crawled through as a student back then, newly alive to Gunn's poetry.
Nott's job, then, is to bring us to Gunn's inevitable end without sensationalising or glamorising the world of sex, drink, drugs and sleaze that fed Gunn's life and work, that gave him images from which to sketch out his philosophies, and were to play some part - still to many readers undefined - in his death.
But to begin at the beginning: Nott starts not quite as you'd expect. The inevitable, traditional chapters about Gunn's parents, the class and condition he was born into, the circumstances that shaped them and created the influences they had on him, are all present, as is the requisite confusing childhood of stops and starts for so many childhoods - except Nott begins in flash-forward, with the suicide of Gunn's mother when he was fifteen. It's this that Nott chooses to shape Gunn around psychologically: as a young semi-sensitive gay boy with an overly-close maternal bond (astonishingly, Nott reveals that for a while they slept in the same bed, and Gunn states at one point that they "were lovers", in a non-sexual form) who, upon having this ripped from him, develops a need to mother others while also seeking the destructive, suicide-like thrill of drugs and sex. He loves masculinity, and cultivates a more macho persona, but in never quite dealing with his mother's death, something remains a little broken, or unfixed within him.
Gunn journeys through school, national service, and Cambridge University, in chapters that have the usual baggy episodic shape, as Nott tries to show a poetic sensibility forming alongside an existential philosophy. I don't know if he's always successful here, and I did think some of the sources of that philosophy are a little on the thin side -- we're expected to just sort of accept his great friend Tony White as both source and embodiment of this influence in Gunn's early volumes.
The middle of Gunn's life, after meeting Mike Kitay and moving to America, where he begins to break away from his original influences (both formal and philosophical) and cultivate a looser, crunchier poetry that has one foot in the head shops of the Haight-Ashbury, is the most serviceable part of the book. It is at its best when exploring Gunn's unconventional relationship setup with Mike Kitay. When I read Gunn's letters last year, I felt bad for Kitay, with Gunn rejecting the monogamous love he sought and neither letting him stay or go, but here, there's a good few years where Kitay comes across as a bit of a pill, and exhausting to be around - though when you pull back and think of Gunn's need to create a new "family" without mothers or fathers, connected instead by sex and friendship, you do see the attractiveness and the frustrations of having another's beliefs thrust onto you.
It's the last quarter of the book, however - Gunn's final decade - where Nott really shines. After the career high of 'The Man with Night Sweats', Gunn is lauded, feted, garlanded and moneyed - just as he enters retirement. Nott weaves in the slow escalation of drug use, the physical and mental decline, the dissipating creative energy and depression this results in, so so skilfully, through little incidents and observations from others. It builds and builds. Gunn's San Francisco family - Kitay and two men who he'd been in relationships with alongside Gunn - feel like characters in a novel. I wanted to scream at them to help him, to do more; as he toys with speed and crystal, as he begins injecting and hallucinating, the drama feels inevitable and yet as if a missing piece could slot into the mechanism of Gunn's life and steer it to safety. I was bereft when he died, though I'd known it was coming.
Gunn was a deliberately restrained, unemotional writer, and he seems to have lived that way as well -- at times Nott struggles with analysis or statement-making because there simply isn't the source material to say exactly how badly Gunn suffered after his mother's death, or how much this influenced certain life decisions. Personally I wonder how much it impacted his misogyny, and whether the fact of him having so few female friends resulted in his decline: his friendships and relationships were so centred on sex, on good looks and virility (his own, others') that you wonder if a few friendships without a sexual undertow might have helped before he got old and despondent about how "nobody fucks old gays".
Lacking this, the book sometimes feels under-analysed, and sometimes over-analytical on not enough evidence. But Nott makes up for it in how closely and sensitively he uses Gunn's diaries and notebooks to construct a journey of self, of development, and to trace Gunn's changing psychology. It's wonderful to get glimpses of drafts and abandoned poems, to see what Gunn confessed to himself and what ideas or feelings he moved through as he worked - the section on 'Moly' especially.
I don't think this book is really for the casual reader, for those who know some of Gunn's more anthlogised poems (the way the Jonathan Bates Ted Hughes biog was absolutely for those who knew him from A Level English and Sylvia Plath drama) but as the length of this review shows, I'm not one when it comes to Gunn. It's the book Gunn deserves, I think, and a big satisfying read for fans like me who wanted to get closer to the man whose poetry worked so hard to keep us at a distance.
January 12, 2024
Nott’s biography of Thom Gunn is clearly a labor of love, and the intense amount of research required to put together this volume is evident in the extensive, and excellent, bibliography. Likewise, Nott weaves together primary sources, including poetry excerpts and unpublished interviews, skillfully to give insight into Gunn’s life. The book is very accessible for an academic text, but I can’t say that I was very inspired while reading it. I found some chapters interesting and others tedious – not due to any fault of Nott, but just because the topics of some parts of Gunn’s life interested me more than others. Still, those interested in Thom Gunn, queer poets, and the time period covered will probably enjoy this book and find it useful.
December 27, 2024
A huge monument, the title taken from a line of Thomas Hardy's, used as the epigraph to Gunn's final collection, Boss Cupid - "Well, it's a cool queer tale!"
Certainly cool - at a remove from Gunn the way Gunn was always at a remove from his subjects; definitely queer - my god the man liked to fuck; and a true tale, the end of which feels like it might be avoided until the final few paragraphs.
All beautifully rendered by Nott.
Certainly cool - at a remove from Gunn the way Gunn was always at a remove from his subjects; definitely queer - my god the man liked to fuck; and a true tale, the end of which feels like it might be avoided until the final few paragraphs.
All beautifully rendered by Nott.
July 22, 2025
Writing I feel is like making reader feel how you felt, what the legacy of your injury had been and why you cried about it. I couldn’t find it in here!
July 15, 2025
Nott's biography of Thom Gunn postures as definitive but collapses under its own intellectual thinness and psychological speculation. The book claims to lead us with care to Gunn's tragic end, but instead offers a muddled and often tone-deaf journey that doesn't truly understands its subject. For all its gestures toward restraint and nuance, Nott seems addicted to cheap Freudian shorthand and undercooked narrative arcs.
The decision to anchor Gunn's life around his mother's suicide is not inherently flawed. What is flawed is the clumsy insistence that this event explains everything from his drug use to his sexual preferences to his supposed misogyny. The result is a biography that feels less like serious analysis and more like a poorly argued undergraduate essay dressed in the trappings of literary scholarship. Gunn is reduced to a damaged boy playing out unresolved trauma for decades, and while that story might be compelling, Nott never earns it with sufficient evidence. Half-quoted diary entries and selectively interpreted comments do not add up to psychological insight.
The structure of the book is baggy and aimless. Early chapters unfold with the lazy inevitability of a checklist: school, army, Cambridge. Friends are introduced as cipher-like influences, mentioned in passing and then suddenly declared crucial. The Tony White sections, for example, are laughably shallow. We're told he shaped Gunn's philosophy, but never shown how or why. The biography constantly declares things without demonstrating them.
The middle third — Gunn's San Francisco years - is slightly more readable, if only because the setting and subject matter are inherently engaging. Yet even here, Nott shows little interest in the intellectual and cultural context that Gunn was moving through. The discussion of his poetry is serviceable at best and glancing at worst. Instead of offering close readings or grappling with the technical evolution in Gunn's craft, Nott prefers to sketch the drugs, leather bars, communal flats and lets those stand in for analysis. This isn't literary biography. It's voyeurism thinly veiled as sympathy.
For a book that claims to honor a poet of restraint and discipline, Nott's biography is indulgent, messy, and ultimately unrewarding. Fans of Gunn will read it anyway, out of loyalty or hunger. But they will come away with a gnawing sense that the man has once a in eluded capture, not because he was inscrutable, but because his biographer lacked the creative vision and writing capacity to see him clearly.
The decision to anchor Gunn's life around his mother's suicide is not inherently flawed. What is flawed is the clumsy insistence that this event explains everything from his drug use to his sexual preferences to his supposed misogyny. The result is a biography that feels less like serious analysis and more like a poorly argued undergraduate essay dressed in the trappings of literary scholarship. Gunn is reduced to a damaged boy playing out unresolved trauma for decades, and while that story might be compelling, Nott never earns it with sufficient evidence. Half-quoted diary entries and selectively interpreted comments do not add up to psychological insight.
The structure of the book is baggy and aimless. Early chapters unfold with the lazy inevitability of a checklist: school, army, Cambridge. Friends are introduced as cipher-like influences, mentioned in passing and then suddenly declared crucial. The Tony White sections, for example, are laughably shallow. We're told he shaped Gunn's philosophy, but never shown how or why. The biography constantly declares things without demonstrating them.
The middle third — Gunn's San Francisco years - is slightly more readable, if only because the setting and subject matter are inherently engaging. Yet even here, Nott shows little interest in the intellectual and cultural context that Gunn was moving through. The discussion of his poetry is serviceable at best and glancing at worst. Instead of offering close readings or grappling with the technical evolution in Gunn's craft, Nott prefers to sketch the drugs, leather bars, communal flats and lets those stand in for analysis. This isn't literary biography. It's voyeurism thinly veiled as sympathy.
For a book that claims to honor a poet of restraint and discipline, Nott's biography is indulgent, messy, and ultimately unrewarding. Fans of Gunn will read it anyway, out of loyalty or hunger. But they will come away with a gnawing sense that the man has once a in eluded capture, not because he was inscrutable, but because his biographer lacked the creative vision and writing capacity to see him clearly.
April 18, 2025
So thoroughly, Michael Nott dissects Gunn’s poetic life and his everyday life.
It took me a few weeks to work my way through the book because Gunn lives his life so intensely.
He was clearly deeply affected by finding his mother after her death. The result was some beautiful poetry. On the Move, of course - one of my favourite poems.
It took me a few weeks to work my way through the book because Gunn lives his life so intensely.
He was clearly deeply affected by finding his mother after her death. The result was some beautiful poetry. On the Move, of course - one of my favourite poems.
October 10, 2024
Definitive.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews