Nonfiction. LGBT Studies. Memoir. Michael Rumaker centers his memoir in 1957 San Francisco, where many fellow Black Mountain students are migrating since the close of the College. Allen Ginsberg, after the notorious readings of his poem HOWL in 1956, has departed for Tangier, but the young Beats are invading North Beach and a dope scene is blooming. The Place is where the poets and painters hang out and Jack Spicer directs Blabbermouth nights. This is the summer of the famous HOWL trial where Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao, of City Lights, are prosecuted for selling Allen Ginsberg's book. Meanwhile the police are stepping up their hassling of hippies on upper Grant Avenue and arresting gays on Polk Street. Rumaker positions his in-depth, eloquent portrait of Robert Duncan against this turbulent city background, and contrasts Robert's open gay life as a poet with his own painful covert sexuality.
Author City: NYACK, NY USA
Michael Rumaker is an American author (born March 5, 1932 in Philadelphia, PA), to Michael Joseph and Winifred Marvel Rumaker. He is a graduate of Black Mountain College (1955) and Columbia University (1970). Most of Rumaker's fiction concerns his life as a gay man. His first book, The Butterfly, is a fictionalized memoir of his brief affair with a young Yoko Ono, published before Ono became famous. His short stories, Gringos and Other Stories, appeared in 1967. A revised and expanded version appeared in 1991. He began to write directly about his life as a gay man in the volumes A Day and a Night at the Baths (1979) and MY FIRST SATYRNALIA (1981). The novel Pagan Days (1991) is told from the perspective of an eight-year old boy struggling to understand his gay self. Black Mountain Days, a memoir of his time at Black Mountain College, has a strong autobiographical element In addition, there are portraits of many students, faculty, and visitors (especially the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson) during its last years, 1952-1956.
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interview by Leverett T. Smith, Jr. @ Rain Taxi