Fragments of a Vessel: Notes Towards Further Queer Histories of Black Mountain College

PART ONE: In Search of the Founding Daddies

“Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together
must match one another in the smallest details,
although they need not be like one another.”
Walter Benjamin ^[1]

“That’s our real history, the one we’re still writing.”
Neil Bartlett ^[2]

Crimes Against Nature. 1945.

In the middle of the night, alone, the beloved rector of Black Mountain College, Robert “Bob” Wunsch, packed all his belongings and left the experimental school forever. No goodbyes, no thank-yous for the years of dedicated service, only silence and shame. Wunsch has just been released from jail on a suspended sentence for trespassing. A local friend had interceded with the judge in the case to override Wunsch’s guilty plea for the original and much more serious charge of “crimes against nature.” The rector had been arrested outside Asheville, North Carolina while sitting in his parked car with a marine. After the incident, he moved to California, and nobody heard from him ever again.^[3]

Summer Night in Madrid. Early 1993.

After having some late drinks with my friends on a hot summer night, I take some furtive steps towards a leafy park known as a meeting point for men looking for other men. Some fracas is going on in the dark, maybe an arrest, so I turn around and walk away briskly. Two guys sit in a car staring at me. I look at them and gesture with my mouth the word “police” as if I am a drag queen showing off my lip-synching skills. They both come out at once and assertively ask me to produce my papers. I am only twenty-two. It feels like somebody has turned on a fan in front of my house of cards. One of the undercover police officers is wearing a grey raincoat.

Old Testaments

In an interview for the seminal history of Black Mountain College, the composer Judd Woldin told the historian Martin Duberman, “everybody was acting, you know, like an Old Testament group…” ^[4] The cruelty with which this self-considered idealistic and contrarian community threw Wunsch under the bus is one of the emotional (and ethical) spines of Duberman’s book, Black Mountain, first published in 1972. Wunsch’s contributions, often overshadowed, to Black Mountain College are given justice in the book: he was the first to suggest the now mythical location that gave the College its name; he joined the faculty in 1935 and taught creative writing classes based on his pioneering textbook Studies in Creative Writing (1933)^[5]; he took over as rector from 1939 to 1945, filling up the big shoes of founder John Andrew Rice in the most critical leadership role at the school; he negotiated the turbulent waters of integrating the College in the South; and he oversaw the very dynamic theatrical programming, directing plays and building with his students the first Black Mountain stage.

New York Times. 1972.

In his Black Mountain, Duberman comes out as gay. The book incorporates fragments from his journals, in which he struggles with the contradictions of a community admired for its contributions to the birth of an American avant-garde. Duberman is particularly attuned to this community’s struggles with homophobia and racism. Duberman attacks the traditional implicit bias against gayness in American historiography by explicitly positioning his perspective as a gay historian. New York Times critic Herbert Leibowitz, in defense of patriarchal dandruff, would have none of it: “Duberman contends that the archival mentality, with its sifting of documents and its apparatus of footnotes and source materials, hides behind its avowal of objectivity and misses the reality it should describe.” Well… Leibowitz accuses Duberman of being “tendentious” for “including his own feelings as a homosexual.”^[6]

Queer Ancestries

Much has been said lately about queer chosen families, how queer folks have been chased away from their places and families of origin, or how they have chosen to run away from them, in search of emotional and/or physical safety and joy. Running for one’s life can have dangerous consequences. In the United States queer youth are still disproportionately affected by homelessness.^[7] Sixty-seven UN Member States still criminalize consensual same-sex conduct among men, with most of those countries applying those laws to women, too.^[8] I am lucky, I landed on my two feet. I have a roof. I have a biological family and a chosen family, or several. In the same manner, some people obsess with their genealogical trees, taking genetic swabs and joining online research services; I use one of those services to look for my chosen ancestors: sexual dissidents that fell through the cracks of traditional historiography, the discarded unpaired socks of the archive, lives delegated to footnotes by cultural interpreters. Today, I’m joining ancestry.com to find Robert Wunsch and other queer men of Black Mountain College.

Transhistorical Grooming

Growing up, I thought I was the first boy ever to be interested in other boys. Then, one day I heard a rumor about Federico García Lorca, and I was nothing short of stunned. Men who loved other men, and at times unintentionally, left crumbles of their existence in that nebulous purgatory of indexed, musky papers and objects called the archive. Crumbles. Fragments left behind for the future generations. A form of transhistorical grooming. The right wing obsessively accuses queer people of grooming younger folks into becoming queer, of trying to make converts by education. It’s hard to believe that in 2023 that trope is back with such force. The transhistorical grooming I’m talking about here is one that involves lessons in survival, one that reassures one man who loved men, to living man, across the chasms of time and space: “You’re not a creature from outer space. You are not the first, and you won’t be the last. We have been here all along.”

A Perfunctory Obit

When Duberman exposed the Wunsch debacle in his 1972 book, he did not know that the victim of the scandal was still alive. Wunsch lived one more year after the publication of Duberman’s book. He died in 1973, age 76, in a hospital in Gardena, California. He had lived for the previous twenty-five years in the Los Angeles area. Duberman mentions a rumor that places Wunsch as an anonymous postal service worker in California. A census from 1950 lists his occupation as a clerk in the unemployment office.^[9] There is another fragment, a tiny perfunctory obituary that says nothing of his pioneering book on creative writing, his faculty work at Rollins College, or his leadership at Black Mountain College. According to this family-sanctioned crumble of information, Wunsch worked as an expediter for Flying Tiger Air Line for twenty years.^[10] Did Wunsch read Duberman’s book before dying? Did he learn his secret was out? And if he did, was he horrified in shame or relieved?

Searching for a Grave

As amateur genealogists join ancestry.com to find photos of their ancestors, I search for images of Wunsch. In a yearbook from 1918, I find the young Wunsch at age 21, height 5 feet 2 inches, weight 125 lbs, delicate lips, the hair combed a bit up and back, clear eyes, the right one a bit crossed, protuberant ear. In the blurb under the photograph, they mention his nickname “Bobby,” “one of the most energetic men in the class,” and “always busy but a good friend.”^[11]” The image and the record are consistent with his reputation for kindness. Even his enemies called him “a nice, sweet guy,” according to Duberman. ^[12] On findagrave.com, I find photos of his tombstone in Green Hills Memorial Park, Rancho Palos Verdes, California. He is buried with his mom. All these fragments of an interrupted gay life, for some reason, seem to me relevant, urgent, and, most surprisingly to me, touching.^[13]

Bob Wunsch in the 1918 Yearbook of North Carolina University.

A Different Career Path

The first rector of Black Mountain College, John Andrew Rice, became a short story writer, publishing in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Saturday Evening Post. Josef Albers went from teaching at Black Mountain College to be the head of design at Yale University. Charles Olson, the last rector when the school closed in 1957, became a distinguished professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where a philanthropic annuity supported his writings. A leadership role at Black Mountain College seemed to have been a prestigious asset, if you were a man, married to a woman, and you had not been accused of any crimes against nature.

Chicago, January 2023.

It is not easy to get ahold of a copy of Wunsch’s Studies in Creative Writing, co-authored by the arts high school teacher Mary Reade Smith, and published in 1933.^[14] The interlibrary loan system got short-circuited, probably because it is an old book, so I have to visit the University of Illinois in Chicago library in person. I am here at 7 a.m. on a very dark, cold, and snowy January. Yes, it is January in Chicago. I am going to spend the morning holding Wunsch in my hands. The hardcover is made of green cloth and uses an art-deco-style font. Very quickly, I recognize his approach; it resembles my own teaching: helping the student build lists, inventories of personal impressions, across senses, across time. Lists allow us to crack our memories and sensations. During my MFA, I learned how to depend on them through Lynda Barry’s exercises via a workshop by Juan Martinez. I use similar exercises in my writing classes. I will be scanning some of these fragments and, from now on, bring them to my students. I will talk to them about Wunsch.

This and Also That

In her essay “Imaginary Landscapes,” Helen Molesworth explains that, to tell a story of Black Mountain College, she had to give up any Aristotelian narrative and the straight lines of conventional history “in favor of a tale structured by polyphony, fragments and a narrative strategy of alloverness.” Molesworth admits: “… I know that my desire for Black Mountain remains bifurcated: I wanted to debunk the myth as much as I wanted to prove it true.”^[15] The legacy of Black Mountain College, when seen through queer-pink lenses, remains fabulously non-binary: the myth is accurate, and the myth is a sham. Black Mountain College’s history is a drag show that equally enjoys the moments of passing and not passing.

Stop this Recording

In the middle of an interview, an anonymous source asks Duberman to turn off the recording tape to discuss something sensitive. The source, identified as “John Doe”, confesses that, being “more homosexual than heterosexual,” Black Mountain College had often been “hell for him” during his nine years in the school. He felt attracted to other men, but he could never act upon it.^[16] This is in a community where heterosexual faculty members and students often have relationships with each other and among themselves. In his secret, Doe recounts he inadvertently outed himself by making an unwanted pass at a married colleague. Doe is called into the rector’s office. Rice, the founding rector, reprimands Doe and allows him to stay in Black Mountain College despite his desires with the tacit agreement of never acting upon them. An institution that, in some respects, seemed to be so far ahead of its time, had a severe problem reconciling its queer dilemmas.

Cruising the Archive

I zoomed in on John Evarts’s name for the first time in a 1940 census.^[17] In the ledger: a male faculty member; age 31; single. “A single man” was often a euphemism for a man who loved other men and no doubt made faculty members like Wunsch and Evarts more questionable. Evarts is included in Duberman’s book, a secondary character and source that most often blends against the wallpaper. I search the archive for his photographs at Black Mountain College. In the first one, I find Evarts listens attentively to Heinrich Jalowetz, the Austrian conductor. Evarts is wearing pants that seem totally out of place in a photographic archive filled with jeans and rural clothes. The pants are fabulous, white, maybe linen. The second photograph is a candid shot of Evarts napping or pretending to nap inside a car. Inexplicably, these two photos send me over the edge. I have a total crush on Evarts.

Photographer unknown, Heinrich Jalowetz and John Evarts on the porch of Lee Hall, Blue Ridge Assembly Campus, Black Mountain College. Courtesy of the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

Photographer unknown, John Evarts asleep in his car on campus at Blue Ridge Assembly. Courtesy of the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

To Set the Record Queer

The American historians whose identities were considered default (let us face it, most often white, Anglo-Saxon, straight) can hide behind a supposedly objective, third-person voice, a pretend omni-sapiency, supported by “evidence” presented within straight chronologies, simplified narratives, and puritanical propriety. The style is a tiresome and pretentious shtick that feels like a Victorian-era corset. That old, heteronormative WASP voice has proven time and time again his inability to unearth or adequately interpret the subject matters of my interest. Queer history cannot be just the same old historiographical methods applied to the queer subject. How to avoid the pressure to create narratives that connect dots through straight lines? How I can be truthful to myself by not being boring? How can I do research in history and give myself the permission to be, literally gay, literally queer, about it?

Danse Macabre

By all accounts, Evarts was also a popular member of the Black Mountain College community. A graduate of Yale, he was a founding faculty member of music. Like Rice and Wunsch, he came from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. He was the unofficial social director in charge of the entertainment, including the traditional Saturday night concert followed by a dance, weekday short dances, cabaret-style acts, and games.^[18] Evarts also oversaw the music in two unforgettable nights at Black Mountain College, arguably the most groundbreaking events celebrated at the College before World War II. Both were shows conceived and directed by Bauhaus veteran Xanti Schawinsky, a remount of a 1927 piece, Spectodrama in 1937, and Danse Macabre in 1938, for which Evarts composed an original score. These pieces were interdisciplinary and immersive, and they involved audience participation, precursors of what, in only a few years, we would call not so much theater but performance art.^[19] Evarts’s time in Black Mountain College ends when, in 1942, after nine years of service for the College, he enlists in the Army.

Homosexuals, Known and Unknown

It is on ancestry.com that I discovered the struggles of John Evarts as a man who loved other men. In a post, a descendant of Evarts quotes a music history book, to mention Evarts’s sexual orientation. Because of my crush on Evarts, this discovery fills me with joy, of course, and gives me the perfect excuse to stalk his ghost in archives and libraries for many more hours to come. It is in historian Amy C. Beal’s book on post-war German and American experimentation in music that I first read about the later struggles of Evarts. After the war, he remains in Germany to assist in the reconstruction efforts to support musicians and the re-organization of orchestras. It was in 1951 that he was dismissed from his post by the U.S. Government on charges of homosexuality, not only for having a “general reputation of being a homosexual,” but God forbid, for associating with “known homosexuals.”^[20]

Did They Know?

Wunsch led the institution through the quixotic enterprise to finalize construction and move to the new campus nearby Lake Eden. Putting into practice the “total approach” in education, the faculty and students at the College were involved in the day to day of building the new facility. Wunsch directed plays by Ibsen and Chekhov, but also more recent American dramas, such as Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, both from 1935, and Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead. I learned these specifics in an article about Black Mountain College that Evarts published in 1967.^[21] He places Wunsch next to Rice and Josef Albers as the crucial leaders during his time in the College. Did they know about each other’s interest in men? Is this something they kept from each other?

Eugene O’Neil, Robert Wunsch applying makeup to Tommy Brooks for a performance of Ah, Wilderness!, Spring 1940. Courtesy of the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

FBI Files

Police ledgers and arrests are some of the official documents that queer historians can access from the archive that may shed some light on queer sites and trends in homophobic crackdowns. These official, but of course unreliable, documents say more about the authorities perpetrating the harassment than anything I can learn about the subjects named on them. Few artifacts of that kind can be ickier and more unfair than a redacted FBI file investigating a gay person for all the wrong reasons. Evarts’s file starts with pages upon pages of reports with redacted names and sources assuring investigators that he was an individual of excellent character, reputation, and loyalty. No evidence of any running with the law in all the places where he resides… and then the file turns to a heavily redacted section about how Evarts had been let go from his State Department job in Germany. Clearly, Evarts was a victim of the Lavender Scare.^[22]

Evarts in Paris

What happens to Evarts after his dismissal from the State Department is found in bits and pieces in asides and footnotes of music history books about post-war Germany: Evarts moves to Paris, where he survives for four years studying French and playing the piano in nightclubs. In 1954, the composer and academic Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of the famous Vladimir, helps Evarts land a job at UNESCO, where he works in several jobs until he retires and moves back to West Berlin at age 75.^[23] He dies there five years later. The journal he wrote during his time at the College confirms my suspicions that Duberman’s John Doe, the source who asked for the recorder to be stopped, was indeed John Evarts.

So Why, Then?

One does not do it for fame or glory. One does not conduct this kind of intense research with the hope of getting many answers about characters in the footnotes of history. If anything, all the archive can offer me for answers is always more questions. Why then am I performing my own Antigone drag show, the one in which I try to secure proper burial for a kinship that I have been denied a right to mourn? I know how that tale ended for Antigone. Not good. So why, then? Like in cruising, is it the thrill of the search and scoring that puts me back obsessively into the inquiry? While I am not sure why I am doing this to you, my dear reader, I can share with you a moment that made all the efforts to this point worth it for me, one of those rare instances when the archive monster regurgitates a gem. An artifact that is both the perfect metaphor, a container of sounds that do not mirror but rhyme with my life history. A treasure that fills me with hope about the potential of trans-generational queer research: John Evarts’s diary during his time at Black Mountain College.

An Old Notebook

Evarts’s notebook is a parking lot of projects he started and never finished. It’s approximately 180 pages, which I receive in seven scanned pdf files sent to me by Heather South, the Lead Archivist of the Western Regional Archives.^[24] The notebook’s first page is signed and dated August of 1933; he was 24 at the time, and, not unlike me at that age, he shows in these multiple false starts and stops the ambition of a writer who lacks the discipline to go beyond the jiffs of inspiration. Each project starts with the same sense of urgency and is abandoned pages later for unclear reasons. The first section is sixteen pages of what he hoped would become a family history, a record of his biological family tree. For a moment, he seemed to have thought that it was in those family roots that his own story started. Soon, as so often happens in queer lives, perhaps he realized the genetic bond that can only take us so far in our hope for historical orientation.

Two Sides

At one point in the notebook, Evarts starts a series of profiles of people in Black Mountain College. In that unfinished project, I find a narrative portrait of John Evarts written by John Evarts in the second person, a form of looking at himself from the outside-in. He talks about himself as a person with two sides: the extroverted, spontaneous, and playful; and a second persona that is lonelier, more modest, and quieter. He sees himself as “more demonstrative than most people and sometimes overdoes it, embarrassing people.”^[25] He recognizes that from these two sides of his personality it’s the outgoing, sentimental one that needs to be reined in. After two more entries into the series of portraits, the project ends, too.

Enter Thorton Wilder

In yet another section from 1934, Evarts dedicates twenty-one pages to document all the details of the brief, but “electrifying” visit to Black Mountain College by Thornton Wilder, which he had coordinated.^[26] It was a coup for a young faculty member to book such an illustrious visit in the early days of the College. I do find it intriguing that Evarts lumps the name of Wilder more than once with that of his closest friends, “brothers,” and confidants up north. In a footnote in a book about post-war German music, David Monod reports comments made by the conductor Newell Jenkins that the reason Evarts was fired from his job in the State Department was because Evarts confessed to the wrong person having had a sexual relationship with Wilder. Monod, in his 2005 book, reports that, after reviewing the journals of Evarts and his correspondence with Wilder, there is no evidence that suggested they had been lovers. (Without adding the caveat that even if that evidence would have existed it would have never made it all the way to the archive.) In 2017, the biographer of Wilder, Penelope Niven, “tied herself in knots in her discussion of Wilder’s confusing sexuality,” as Robert Gottlieb mentioned in the New Yorker.^[27] It was Samuel Steward’s retelling of his affair with Wilder, an affair of extreme discretion and no kisses, that Niven felt compelled to put in doubt. ^[28]

Unreliable sources

We were young and J. lived in a small rural town in the North of Spain. I was in Madrid. When we wrote letters to each other in the late ’80s, I had to pretend to be my cousin Rosa. And when he answered my letters, he coded anything he wanted to say to me as something I should convey to Rosa on his behalf. I was going through old boxes when I ran into an old letter from J. addressed to me and… my cousin Rosa. For a few minutes I was absolutely puzzled by the letter. It has been thirty years since we wrote to each other, so I didn’t even remember the secret code. Then I did. It started as a safety measure for him and ended as a hilarious, twisted joke for both. If this letter would end up in the archive, what conclusions would future research take from its content? The queer archive will always be unreliable because the world, for most of us, was, is, and will always be unreliable.

Photographer unknown, Thorton Wilder at Black Mountain College, 1934. Courtesy of the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

Pathos

After the diary entries about Wilder’s visit, there is a section entitled Interlude. A friend has sent a letter to Evarts, telling him that he must burn it after reading it. Evarts copies anonymized excerpts from the letter into his journal “because the letter is so deeply revealing of the pathos of one person’s life, and of the experience of loving.” The male friend tells Evarts the story of falling in love with a man who admitted to having relationships with both men and women. While refusing to share a bed with the man, the man comes to Evarts before sleeping on the sofa to say goodnight, and they embrace. “I think I shall always remember it as one of the great moments of my life. It was merely an embrace, chaste and unimpassioned, but we sat there for a few minutes in the dark looking out at the sky, and for the first time, I knew what it was to be really near someone I loved.” Evarts is profoundly shaken by the letter. “I have also felt that loneliness often. I have felt it here.” And then a declaration of brotherhood, of kinship to the writer: “My affection for him is very great and completely platonic… we are like the closest of brothers, but even closer and more revealing to each other. With Thornton, I feel something of that same affinity, though he is perhaps more removed from me.”^[29]

Family Camp

The familial terms of endearments have been a playful part of the gay vernacular for who knows how long. Daddy, as a reference to an older gay man. Auntie in the UK, and tante in France, a nickname, often a putdown, to refer to an older queen. In Quebec, I hear they use matante, as in my aunt. Sister is also a term applied to a close friend of any gender. And of course, the mothers and the fathers of the different houses in the Ballroom scene of New York City. I find it telling that Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder nicknamed the young men she was introducing to him as “kiddos”. Sometimes these terms became legally literal, literal in the archive, when gay and lesbians adopted their younger lovers to secure inheritance, visiting rights and other protections straight couples accessed through marriage.^[30]

Shattered Confidence

The journal also details Evarts’s infatuation with a member of the community that ended with him being scolded in the rector’s office. “I was in love with him beyond myself and my reason.” ^[31]“Him” was Ed Jenks, a student who went from being very close to Evarts to having a relationship with another friend of both, Betty Young. As the semester ended, John recorded “a sudden turn that brought new worry and fear.” Rice, in his office, talks to John about the situation, “…and impressed on me the seriousness of the innuendos it had caused, the general criticism. And shattered what new confidence in living and working I had gained.” ^[32] The fragmented journals exude love and passion for the cause of Black Mountain College but also loneliness and alienation, an impossibility of loving and being loved that at times is embodied in a specific man and at times, is just a general longing. At one point, Evarts recognizes the danger he is in because of the scrutiny of the community. He ponders his options: “condition” himself, the opposite, acquire a lot of experience in New York City, or “not think about it.” No matter how utopic, the Black Mountain College before the Second World War was still heavily rooted in the limitations of America. And then came the war.

Writing Prompt

Write as many words as you can starting with “ambi”, meaning both or on both sides. Ambidexter, ambience, ambifarious, ambiform, ambigenal, ambigu, ambiguous, ambilevous, ambilingual, ambisexual, ambisonic, ambit, ambitious?, ambitude, ambivalence, ambiversion…

The Subversiveness of Friendship

Consumed by the intrigues of Black Mountain College and the shattering conversation with the rector, Evarts visits his family and friends in New York in the winter break of 1934. He admits the gloom of his family life there and not being exactly in a cheerful mood himself. But “the expressions of devotion by his closest friends allows him to have “a very ‘gay’ holiday, going out almost every night.”^[33] The quotations around the word “gay” are his, which underlines the double entendre and, most telling for me, the adoption of an identity and his sense of belonging to a subculture in New York City that seem to offer him some consolations. Foucault famously said that what makes homosexuality “disturbing” and “troubling” is the homosexual mode of life, not the sex but rather the “affection, tenderness, that we can have for each other.”^[34]

Foundlings

Christopher Nealan felicitously proposed the concept of “foundling” as an alternative to two models: one that pathologizes homosexuality and one that sees homosexuals as an ethnic group. Nealan established in his analysis of pre-Stonewall foundlings texts and images as a metaphor, a movement that goes from the exile of family and institutions towards a sense of community.^[35] The wreckage that has survived from the lives of Wunsch and Evarts seem to indicate that the first suffered fully the pathology and the criminalization of his desires, while the second may have found his way toward a brotherhood, a kinship that, beyond the limits of the Black Mountain College community, allowed him to plow forward and survive. And for me? I do find the literal concept of “foundling” helpful. I think of Wunsch and Evarts as two lost orphans in the footnotes of the Black Mountain College histories. Maybe not as much as my ancestors, but from now on, my adopted children. Or maybe both things at the same time. Sometimes, family ties can be that queer.

PART TWO: Floating Debris

“My defence at any Last Judgement would be,
‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments
I was born with.’”
EM Forster to Forrest Reid, 1915

Queering the Line

It goes like this: Walt Whitman (1819-1892) slept with Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), Edward Carpenter slept with Gavin Arthur (1901-1972), Gavin Arthur slept with Neal Cassady (1926-1968), Neal Cassady slept with Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). Ginsberg, with the help of Arthur, figured out their gay succession.^[36] What a great take on that straight White obsession with finding an ancestor who came on the Mayflower or fought in the American Revolution! This inspires my next venture: to develop a new social network called queerancestry.com, where we can log in our escapades and figure out a historical lineage. Dear reader, did you sleep with Allen Ginsberg or somebody who slept with him? If you did, please contact me. Maybe we can arrange something.

The shape of this lineage wouldn’t be a straight line, or a tree, but a gay constellation. Therefore, any fragment of queer histories creates a promiscuity of starting points.

Blasting Out the Continuum

Around World War II, an international constellation of queer men exploded in visual and literary forms, first in the vernacular expressions (real life) and then in the professionalized arts. Modernism became post, and not just because one or another “great man” took us all from point A to B. From the bars to the baths, from private parties to cars and rest stops, from art studios to gallery openings, a constellation of mid-century North Atlantic queers tore up the boundaries of what could be done, said, and shown.

Much has already been placed under the umbrella of the “Homintern,” that international group of elite gay men and women that intermingled from around the time the term “homosexual” was first used until, one can argue, this day. But that narrative runs the risk of forgetting how hundreds, thousands of men who had sex with other men also contributed to this new visual, linguistic, and everyday culture. I’m zeroing in at a more specific juncture when several generations of gay men, not all famous or privileged, overlapped at a midcentury queer explosion. A cluster of the resulting constellation happened to have studied or taught at Black Mountain College.^[37]

I Couldn’t Say

Usually, one visits an archive searching for something not yet explored nor interpreted. This is not the case today. I’m visiting the papers of John Cage at Northwestern University, with the sole purpose of holding in my hands, like a relic, a letter Merce Cunnigham wrote to Cage in 1953 from Black Mountain College. I learned about its existence in Philip M. Gentry’s What Will I Be. It’s a typewritten letter. I was obsessed with typewriters when I was a kid, and I would play them the way one plays the piano, mocking how my father wrote on it until I finally learned to type myself. The letter by Cunningham uses no caps, starts with “john,” and ends: “we all miss you very much, and wish you were here to enliven us. there seems to be a greatly serious air about the place this summer, (…) when i phoned you, i couldn’t say endearments because of groups around, but i say them now, and miss you very much and send you all my best love, and great kisses. love, Merce.” ^[38]

Freeing the Rosary Beads

Walter Benjamin theorized that the revolutionary classes would make the continuum of history explode: “A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.”^[39] My queer ancestors who blasted out “the continuum of history” left me with something that may look like debris, but is in truth a constellation of fragments. Dianne Chisholm’s study, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City, gives me the perfect Benjaminian metaphor to explore the life and work of men who shared their bodies and artifacts with other men in the middle of the 20^th century. And how my own collage-life is marked by what those men did and what they made, how they did it and how they made it.^[40]

Collage

In the same way I try to collage the fragments of these Black Mountain histories, professional and amateur artists explored the collage form to embrace the lack of unity in their lives. Juxtaposition was a way to at least try to re-ensemble the fragments of their existence. I see the collage as a primordial queer artifact, a stance and an approach that often bends differently when implemented by queer professional and vernacular artists. The urgency is different, and the playfulness, too. Combining the modernist technique with a subverting of the family scrapbook, since at least the 1920s, North Atlantic men who loved other men juxtaposed images to represent and re-imagine their fractured lives and desires while questioning the traditional lines separating gender roles or incorporating coded fragments of their secret or not so secret lives.^[41]

These queer collages were an evolution of the personal scrapbooks of the gay vernacular; some of its iconography doesn’t match the expectations of what a male scrapbook should look like. We find celebrities (male and female), flowers, decorating fabrics, partial and complete nudity of male bodies from classical art, or athletes. “Wait, we are not done with the human figure,” these artifacts seem to tell the abstract tendencies of the time, “The subject matter of the human body has not been exhausted.”

Encounters

Cage and Cunningham visited Black Mountain College for the first time in 1948. It was a short five-day visit to perform in exchange for food and housing. The students left for them an assemblage of gifts under the car: paintings, drawings, and food. Most importantly, they got invited back to teach.^[42] Upon returning to New York, Cage recommended the sculptor Richard Lippold for the faculty. He was accepted and moved to the community with his wife and two kids.^[43] At the college, Lippold met the student Ray Johnson, often considered the father of mail art, and they started a relationship that lasted two decades. The same year Lippold moved to Black Mountain, Robert Rauschenberg came as a student and then returned in the summers of ’51 and ’52. He becomes a close friend and collaborator of both Cunningham and Cage. It was in ’51 that Rauschenberg brought Cy Twombly, his lover and friend. From this cluster, Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg are canonical figures of the 20^th century. It’s hard to believe today that it took much longer for Johnson and Twombly to receive their due. (Duberman doesn’t even mention them in his book.) Now they are both part of the pantheon themselves. Lippold may be the foundling in this group.

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled [John Cage, Black Mountain], 1952. Gelatin silver print, 14 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches (37.5 x 37.5 cm). © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, RRF Registration # 52.P017.

No Traditional Scripts

The so-called road to liberation was not just about sex and relationships. A personal liberation took place when queer folks started living what the theorist Jack Halberstam calls the “(p)otentiality of life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing.”^[44] Queer lives broke the continuum of history and personal biography by often not adhering to the timelines informed by heterosexual expectations of marriage, childbirth, and child-rearing. In queer-land, a biography may have many beginnings and endings, no straight-line narratives, and multiple climaxes. There is a promiscuity of ways, shapes, and “points of departure.” For the article John Cage wrote in 1961 about his friend, collaborator, and fellow Black Mountain veteran, Robert Rauschenberg, he gives the following instructions: “It may be read in whole or in part; any sections of it may be skipped, what remains may be read in any order.”^[45] Suddenly, without following the formulated script, a life or a work of art could move from being predictable to becoming a piece of avant garde performance art. The queer constellation of artists from Black Mountain College, like many other gay men of their generation, performed their artwork, performed their biographies, and performed their surroundings. All in the form of assembled fragments.

Moticos

After leaving Black Mountain College, Ray Johnson started experimenting with new collage forms, the most memorable involving celebrity iconography (James Dean, Elvis Presley . Later he created installations of cutouts mounted onto cardboard, something that feels like a three-dimensional scrapbook, a scrapbook that has come to life. In the surviving stills, one can recognize additional classic queer iconography like the shirtless beefcake, fragmented male nudes, and glamourous shots from male and female fashion magazines. The vertical strips and cutouts resemble an abstract city model. He called these moticos.^[46] In the Village Voice, he theorized on the motico: “It may appear in your daily newspaper. Someone may put it there. Cut it out. Save it. Treasure it.” Some decades later, in his prolific (and promiscuous) mail art practice, he collages his own life experiences, real and imagined and mails the fragments to friends and co-conspirators. Seeing his mail art on display recently at the Art Institute of Chicago, I got a sense of being in front of a tremendous gay prank, an infinite and camp parody of the archive.^[47] In a letter to a “Cowboy Bart,” he reports: “Janet Leigh as beautiful as ever at the Anvil .”^[48] Celebrity and homo-erotica. This is a classic queer juxtaposition of icons seen over and over in scrapbooks, collage art, and, if we were to believe Johnson’s joke, in the real world. Jonathan Weinberg connected the collages and moticos of Johnson to previous scrapbooks like those of Carl Van Vechten. Among many other examples of the genre, one can also mention the collaborative scrapbooks of H. D., Kenneth Macpherson, and Bryher, those of Cecil Beaton in the 1930s, and the scrapbooks that Jess was working on in the 1950s.

Collage in motion

In 1952, Cunningham started to work on a piece that combined “found” movement in the mundane (running, walking, skipping, nail filing, combining, hand washing) with the virtuosic. The piece is renamed a year later: “Collage.”^[49] That same year at Black Mountain College, John Cage was working on Williams Mix, his first composition of spliced magnetic tape, and the performance, Theater Piece No. 1. Cutting, pasting, and the juxtaposition of found materials was a key component of Jose Alber’s methodologies of teaching color and composition.^[50] According to Molesworth, “Collage was everywhere at Black Mountain.”^[51]

Detail Ray Johnson’s Moticos performance by Elizabeth Novick, circa 1955. © The Ray Johnson Estate / ARS, New York.

Combines

I’ve been glued to the “combines” Rauschenberg created shortly after his time at Black Mountain College: hybrids between painting and sculpture seem to function as a new modality of queer scrapbook. One of them showed up in a Cunningham choreography as a set. When he exhibited his combines, critics didn’t miss the implications. Among the attacks he received, one stands out. In 1961, Jack Kroll, who would eventually become the influential art critic for Newsweek, compared the combines to Walt Whitman, Ronald Firbank, Baron Corvo and underlined the “pitfall of Capotean indulgences, of Harper’s Bazaar sensibility.”^[52] I have never seen such a well-versed homophobic review, or one that, at the same time, clumsily functions as an unintentional compliment.

Robert Rauschenberg, Cy + Relics, Rome, 1952. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 inches, image; sheet 20 x 16 inches (38.1 x 38.1 cm, image; sheet 50.7 x 40.5 cm). © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, RRF Registration # 52.P004.

The Shrine

On my desk, I’m building a paper shrine to Rauschenberg. This guy had the most disarming smile I have ever seen. Next to books with their pages open to the combines, I have printouts of two photos he took. The first one is a portrait of Cy Twombly among fragmented relics of a statue of Constantine, Rome 1952. A massive hand with a finger pointing up, the young Cy in profile. A visit to the ancestral land of beauty and an idealized, pre-Christian sexual freedom. Their trip must have felt to the two young lovers like a honeymoon, a back to our roots journey, as those Americans who visit Cork in Ireland. This photo, one of Twombly’s most famous, was not printed by Rauschenberg until forty years after the fact.^[53] The near misses of the archive make my head spin. The second is a photograph Rauschenberg took of his own relics in his Fulton Street Studio a year later. His own shrine. A little hand with a finger pointing in the opposite direction, artwork, sketches, trinkets. Rauschenberg, the scavenger of fragments. Rauschenberg, dumpster-diver of fragments. Rauschenberg, the forager of fragments. John Cage said, “There is in Rauschenberg, between him and what he picks up to use, the quality of encounter.”^[54] Rauschenberg, the cruiser.

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled [Fulton Street studio (I)], ca. 1953. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 inches: image; paper, 20 x 16 ” (38.1 x 38.1 cm: image; paper, 20 x 16 “). © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, RRF Registration # 53.P007.

A Tree of Life

Nicola Del Roscio was sixteen years younger than Cy Twombly. They met in the 1960s and became, as they used to say, “long-term companions,” and, after Twombly’s death, the keeper of the flame and the rightful gatekeeper of the legacy. De Roscio describes the first encounter with Twombly’s studio and his artwork: “It was an astonishing revelation, a tree of life, a puzzle of scattered ideas, sedimentation of psychological experiences, memories narrated using colors, fragmented figures, numbers, lines of poetry, graffiti, stripped down symbols that invited me to recompose the scene in my own mind.”^[55] Twombly’s work is also a collage, also a scrapbook, also a shrine. Twombly’s work is queering abstract expressionism.

Juxtapositions

In How to Do the History of Homosexuality, David M. Halperin makes an example of a “brilliant and original exploration of how to do the history of male homosexuality”: Neil Bartlett’s Who was that man? from 1988.^[56] In Bartlett’s fragmentary book, he explains his use of scrapbooks to make sense of his own research while writing a book about gay ancestry that often feels like a scrapbook itself. Bartlett also proposes the existence of a living history in each gay household: “Somewhere in the house, flat or room of each of my lovers and friends there is a draft of a book like this one. He’s never shown me the manuscript, but I know he has a record collection, a drawer of photographs, a wall of pictures, a mantelpiece of postcards, a bookshelf, a wardrobe of clothes. If you or he can “read” this collection of words and images, with all its attendant justifications, juxtapositions, and cross references, you will have a gay story, a history.”

Vertical Scrapbooks

When I got my first “room of my own” at age 22, a studio in Atlanta, I also created shrines with fragments of my life so far, arrangements on the walls with postcards, photographs of my idols, my own early miscellanea including collages ripped from the pages of my own journals. Scrapbooks on a shelf and wall. While this could be a gesture taken by any college student, the character of my images would have said specific things about my queerness. Somewhere in my chaotic archive, my boxes, I have photos I took of those vertical scrapbooks. I imagine what it must have been for my post-world ancestors to finally get their own apartments and art studios where they could decorate and rearrange their iconography without the opprobrium of any judging glances. Some of these artifacts by the post-world generation of gay men have been savaged in their collages, now some considered masterpieces, personal scrapbooks in the archive, and in some cases in surviving photographs they took of their three-dimensional collages, their shrines, and walls. The dynamic nature of the arrangement calls for the need to document the instant. A photograph of another shrine, Jess’s art studio, connects the dots to a different area of the constellation, a cluster of gay men associated with Black Mountain College.

Emotionally Unfit

The artist Jess preferred the name paste-up to collage. His pastes-up and scrapbooks are lush and grandiose. His life-long partner was Robert Duncan, the poet who connects the Black Mountain constellation with the San Francisco scene, including the gay poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. In the last years of the College, Duncan did several stints as a teacher there. These visits and his role in the Black Mountain Review place him at the top of the lists of poets known as the Black Mountain School. 1956 was the first time Duncan had been in Black Mountain. In 1938 he came as a student, and one day later, he was turned away as “emotionally unfit.”^[57] Duncan always wondered if he was turned away because of his political ideas or because “they had recognized that I was homosexual?” The fact that Duncan could visit now with Jess was telling not only as a change of the times but also as proof that somebody like Duncan could forgive the institution for such a slap on the face. Duncan and Jess made friends with another cluster of gay men from Black Mountain, the editor Jonathan Williams, the poet John Wieners, and the writer Michael Rumaker.

Left Out

In “The Politics of Being Queer” (1969), Paul Goodman calls out how he was fired from, among other places, Black Mountain College. “These were highly liberal and progressive institutions, and two of them prided themselves on being communities. Frankly, my experience of radical community is that it does not tolerate my freedom.”^[58] Goodman was a master of a stance I call queer goading, the queer art of doubling down when facing external shame: screaming your gayness when requested to tone it down. This goading made him a threat to both his straight and gay peers. Duberman reports that in the summer of 1950, several exclusively homosexual men were members of the community, but that it was Goodman’s very open bisexuality, and his defiant stands, that created a commotion in the College, including a fist fight in one of the meetings dealing with what to do about Goodman. In the end, they didn’t invite him back.

Crude Candor

It’s hard to believe how notorious and present Paul Goodman was in his time and how rarely discussed he is now. In his “crude candor” about his sexual escapades in person and writing, he may have been one of the first public intellectuals to blast doors for the post-Stonewall movement.^[59] In Five Years, published in 1966, Goodman cuts out fragments from his journals between 1955 and 1960 and re-arranges them in a collaged memoir. He shatters sexual taboos of the queer kind one after the other: promiscuity, anonymous cruising, sex with men much younger and much older, interclass queer encounters, Uptown homosexual snobbery, and honest auto-theory about his shame and confusion. One can see why his approach would have left him without many friends. To me, as he says in a fragment: “He rubs me gently the wrong way – to my delight.”^[60]

Privacy

Rumaker was one of the last students to graduate, and his memoir, Black Mountain Days, tells, in some respects, a more positive story of what it was to be gay in the last years of the community. In part, no doubt, because his retellings are from 2003, a time in which he could also report more openly. For one, he had two same-sex love affairs on campus, one with Merrill Gillespie and another with somebody documented as “Jake.” Rumaker also reports that John Wieners could openly share lodgings with his male boyfriend, Dana Durkee. “Black Mountain, although it didn’t exactly welcome lesbian and gay students and faculty with open arms, was at least tolerant in its respect for individual privacy.”^[61] In Rumaker’s memoir, he establishes that the innuendo and tensions at the school were nothing compared to what he expected after graduation back in the real world.

And What About the Lesbians?

Dear reader, you may have been wondering, too. Where were they? How did they cope in such a macho-centric environment? How did they sustain unwanted advances or the innuendos? A former student remembered: “Liaisons between faculty and students did take place, but other than in the summer sessions, the only liaison that I knew of between faculty was a lesbian one.”^[62]

Despite the Hardships

In a fragmented essay on what he calls tangential recollections of Black Mountain, Thomas Meyer, the life partner of Jonathan Williams, recounts how, by the 1960s, the institution had achieved a glamorous aura. The myth of the school was permeating into popular media: “Jonathan’s feeling about all that attention was ambivalent, flattered to be part of it all yet acutely aware that the college folded in 1957 because it couldn’t rouse any support, any notice whatsoever.”^[63] In the last letter from Rumaker to Williams, in 2008, the nostalgia overflows like a paste-up by Jess: “Well, old fellow Black Mountaineer- old Black Mountain-ear- wasn’t that a gift and pleasure, despite the hardships, to have been there, to have found our feet on that lively (sacred?) ground.”^[64]

Grand Collage

The queer house shrines of Jess and Duncan’s home in California were like their own work, a lascivious cornucopia. Jess created paste-ups that were expansive, mythical, and mystical. They aim more towards a neo-baroque than Pop Art, even if so much of the vernacular queer iconography is still there: the shirtless men, the fragments of relics, and an overall queer gaze… Duncan saw his poetry as a “grand collage,” a poetry of all poetries, a poetics of capacious love filled with erotic implications. “Where you are he or I am he, the trouble of an Eros shakes the household in which we work to contain our feeling in our extending our feeling into time and space.”^[65]

The Impossibility of Retelling

The fragments of the vessel have no way to be glued back together. In constellations, there is more convergence than unity, a sense that the laws of gravity will only keep those pieces floating for so much longer. As the universe expands, the fragments are further apart. Each fragment wants to be liberated from the constraints of scripted expectations, including mine. Every man’s sexual or affective encounter with another man or men, being fleeting or lasting, wants to transcend time and space; it wants to be secret, and it wants to be screamed. And, therefore, traditional history fails me time after time. Witnessing queer fragments of history expand and dissipate produces a sense of vertigo, but I have to continue the (re)search, the hunt, the cruising. Fishing as many more fragments as I can from the dumpster of memory before it’s too late. I compulsively hoard these fragments. I have to because as Bartlett said, “It matters that the patterns of my life were set by men who came before me.”^[66]

^[1] Walter Benjamin. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), 21.

^[2] Neil Bartlett. Who was that man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde. (Penguin, 1993), 223

^[3] Martin Duberman, Black Mountain (W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), 230.

^[4] Duberman, Black Mountain, 232.

^[5] For the contributions of Wunsch to the teaching of creative writing at Black Mountain College, see: Burns, Lucy. “‘Creative Writing […] Has a Place in the Curriculum’: Robert Wunsch at Black Mountain College, 1933-43,” Journal of Black Mountain College Studies 11: The Practice and Pedagogy of Writing at Black Mountain College (Fall 2020), accessed January 29, 2023, https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/robert-wunsch-at-black-mountain-college/

^[6] Herbert Leibowitz, “Like a Who’s Who of the Avant‐Garde,” New York Times, October 29, 1972, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/29/archives/black-mountain-an-exploration-in-community-by-martin-duberman.html

^[7]   “Homelessness and Housing Instability among LGBTQ Youth.” The Trevor Project, February 2, 2022, https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/homelessness-and-housing-instability-among-lgbtq-youth-feb-2022/ According to True Colors United, Young LGBTQ people are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than those who are not queer. 28% of queer youth reported experiencing homelessness or house instability, with those percentages being even higher for those who are trans or non-binary. See: “Our Issue.” True Colors United, August 26, 2021. https://truecolorsunited.org/our-issue/

^[8] “ILGA World Updates State-Sponsored Homophobia Report: ‘There’s Progress in Times of Uncertainty.’” ILGA World, December 22, 2020. https://ilga.org/ilga-world-releases-state-sponsored-homophobia-December-2020-update

^[9] U.S. Census Bureau; 1950, Record Group Number: 29; Residence Date: 1950; Home in 1950: Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California; Roll: 3395; Sheet Number: 42; Enumeration District: 66-2548C; www.ancestry.com

^[10] Obituary for William Robert Wunsch, The Redondo Reflex Redondo, California, May 16, 1973, p. 25.

^[11] “U.S., School Yearbooks, 1880-2012”; School Name: North Carolina University; Year: 1918

^[12]Duberman, Black Mountain, 147.

^[13] “William Robert Wunsch (1896-1973) – Find a Grave…” Find a Grave, accessed January 29, 2023, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/72157603/william-robert-wunsch

^[14] Wunsch William Robert and Mary Reade Smith. Studies in Creative Writing (H. Holt ,1933).

^[15]Helen Molesworth, “Imaginary Landscapes,” Leap Before You Look, 73.

^[16] Duberman, Black Mountain, 69-70.

^[17] U.S. Census Bureau; 1940, Swannanoa-Grovemont, Buncombe, North Carolina. Roll: m-t0627-02878; Page: 29B; Enumeration District: 11-58; www.ancestry.com

^[18] Mark Davenport, “Variations on a Ground: Patsy Lynch at Black Mountain College.” Appalachian Journal 44/45 (2017): 416–29, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45124294.

^[19]Duberman, Black Mountain, 90.

^[20]Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (University of California Press, 2006), 31.

^[21]John Evarts, “Black Mountain College-The total approach,” Form No. 6, (1967), 21.

^[22] John Evarts FBI File Number 123-HQ-3920. Special thanks to Amy C. Beal for scanning and sharing this file in record time. She had previously obtained the copies from Jean Missud, who filled the original Freedom of Information Act request.

^[23] Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov, A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford University Press, 2015), 272. See also: H.H. Stuckenschmidt, M. Je., Wolfgang Geiseler, Jean-Pierre Muller and Jürgen Dietrich, “From 20th Anniversary of the International Institute for Comparative Music Studies” The World of Music 26, no. 1 (1984): 95-108, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43560975

^[24] John Evarts Journal, Black Mountain College 1938-1939, Section IV-7, Black Mountain College Project Papers, box 7, Western Regional Archives.

^[25] Johns Evarts Journal, Black Mountain College 1938-1939, Section IV, 7.

^[26] Johns Evarts Journal, Black Mountain College, March 1934, Section I-a.

^[27] Robert Gottlieb,, “Man of Letters.” The New Yorker, December 31, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/07/man-of-letters-5

^[28] In 2018, Jeremy Mulderig published an edited volume combining the autobiographical writings of Steward. See: Samuel Steward, The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life. (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 22-24.

^[29] Johns Evarts Journal, Interlude.

^[30] Elon Green,, “The Lost History of Gay Adult Adoption,” The New York Times, October 19, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/magazine/the-lost-history-of-gay-adult-adoption.html

^[31] Johns Evarts Journal, Black Mountain College 1938-1939, Section IV, 7

^[32] Johns Evarts Journal, Section I-g, 18

^[33] Johns Evarts Journal, Section I-g, 19

^[34] Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984 (The New Press, 1997), 136.

^[35]Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke University Press, 2001).

^[36] Gavin Arthur, “The Gay Succession,” in Gay Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine, An Anthology of Gay History, Sex, Politics and Culture, ed. Winston Leyland (Gay Sunshine Press, 1991), 323. First appeared in Gay Sunshine Journal 35, 1978.

^[37] Jonathan D. Katz’s pioneer art history work has focused on several queer artists of this generation at the postmodern injunction, including in: Jonathan D. Katz, “‘Committing the Perfect Crime’: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008): 38–53, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068581; Jonathan D. Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence; Or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” GLQ 5, no. 2 (1999): 49.

^[38] The interpretation of Cage’s silence is also address in the book where I first read about the Cunnigham letter to Cage: Philip M. Gentry, What Will I Be (Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition, 2017), 135-36, 169. See also: Letter from Merce Cunningham to John Cage, July 16, 1953, id88537, Box: 2, Folder: 6, Sleeve: 22, John Cage Collection, The Northwestern University Library.

^[39] Benjamin, 263.

^[40] Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Citations in all in indexical coldness don’t make justice to what some sources mean to me. Chisholm is one of several queer theorists that helped me find words that, in the process of understanding artifacts, helps this author understand his own life. Oh, that fine line between queer theory and queer praxis!

^[41] I’m currently researching the vernacular queer roots of pop collage. Among other early queer forms of visual juxtaposition in the 1920’s we have two examples from the Harlem Renaissance: an illustration for his collage story Smoke, Lillies and Jade by Richard Bruce Nugent, c. 1925; and live-in queer scrapbook (inside the walls of a closet) in Max Ewing’s ‘Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits” c.1928.

^[42] Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Northwestern University Press, 2010), 72.

^[43] Duberman, 293

^[44] Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. (NYU Press, 2005), 2

^[45] John Cage, Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 98.

^[46] For further analysis on the motico installations see: Sofia Kofodimos. “Collages in Motion: The Transformations and Dispersal of Ray Johnson’s Moticos.” Sofia Kofodimos Blog., accessed January 30, 2023, https://sofiakofodimos.wordpress.com/2017/10/16/collages-in-motion-the-transformations-and-dispersal-of-ray-johnsons-moticos/. These installations were destroyed by Ray Johnson. Documentation of the work exists in photographs taken in Autumn 1955, New York by Elisabeth Novick.

^[47] Caitlin Haskell ed., Ray Johnson C/o, (Art Institute of Chicago, 2021).

^[48] The Anvil was a multilevel gay bar in New York City that acted as site for a carnaval of gay sex practices in the 70’s until it was shut down during the AIDS crisis. The letter to Cowboy Bart is reported in Jonathan Weinberg, “Ray Johnson Fan Club,” in Ray Johnson Correspondeces, ed. Donna De Salvo and Catherine Gudis (Flamarion, 1999), 99.

^[49] “Collage.” Merce Cunningham Trust, accessed January 31, 2023, https://www.mercecunningham.org/the-work/choreography/collage/.

^[50] Roger Copelan, “Cunningham, Cage and Collage,” in Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance, (Routledge, 2004), 165-182.

^[51] Molesworth, 182.

^[52] Jack Kroll, “Reviews and Previews: Robert Rauschenberg,” Art News 60, no. 8 (December 1961): 12.  For a queer read of the early combines see: Katz, “Committing,” 38-53. and Folland, Tom. “Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism: The Early Combines and Decoration,” The Art Bulletin, 92, No. 4 (December 2010), 348-36.

^[53] Joshua Rivkin, Chalk (Melville House, 2018), 17.

^[54] Cage, 103.

^[55] Del Roscio, introduction to Cy Twombly Drawings, vol. 3, n.p. quoted in Rivkin, 136.

^[56] David M. Halperin . How to Do the History of Homosexuality. (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 137.

^[57] Robert Duncan, and James Maynard, “Black Mountain College,” Appalachian Journal 44/45 (2017), 266–70, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45124266.

^[58] Paul Goodman, “The Politics of Being Queer,” Nature Heals: The Psychological Essays of Paul Goodman ed. Taylor Stoehr (Free Life Editions, 1977)

^[59] Kingsley Widmer, Paul Goodman (Twayne Publishers, 1980), 21.

^[60] Paul Goodman, Five Years (Brussel & Brussel, 1966), 247, 251.

^[61] Michael Rumaker, Black Mountain Days: A Memoir (Spuyten Duyvil, 2003), 590.

^[62] Charles Perrow, “Drinking Deep at Black Mountain College.” Southern Cultures 19.4 (2013), 76–94.

^[63] Thomas Meyer,  “Black Mountain: A Tangential Recollection,” Appalachian Journal 44/45 (2017): 254–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45124264.

^[64] Jeffery Beam, Jonathan Williams: Lord of Orchards, (Easton Studio Press, 2017), 55.

^[65] Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow (New Directions, 1968), vi-vii.

^[66] Bartlett, xxii.