Michael Nott’s unsanctimonious biography of Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life, draws out his complexities and contradictions
: Evening Standard/Hulton/Getty
Inside the story of Thom Gunn lurks a strange, almost Jekyll and Hyde mismatch of split personalities. One face shows a kind, courteous, civilised friend and conscientious university teacher who believed in honour and who wrote poetry that delighted in classical form and moral clarity. The other reveals a tattooed leather queen who rejected his Hampstead upbringing and Cambridge education to opt for an orgiastic life of sexual abandon and drug consumption in the gay underworld of San Francisco. In Michael Nott’s admirably unsentimental and unsanctimonious biography both these aspects are drawn with scrupulous honesty, allowing all Gunn’s complexities and contradictions to emerge unvarnished.
His first childhood hero was Beatrix Potter’s dirty and disobedient Tom Kitten; his second was Julien Sorel, the volatile truculent outsider at the heart of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir. Like them, Thom Gunn could not conform. Born in 1929, he grew up in relatively comfortable material circumstances and was educated in prestigious private schools.
But his relationship with his parents turned toxic: his drunken and erratic Fleet Street hack of a father abandoned and divorced his mother, a capricious socialist of Bohemian temperament, with whom Gunn was Oedipally obsessed to the point of sleeping in her bed and wearing her clothes. After the failure of her second marriage, she gassed herself. Gunn was a vulnerable mousey teenager at the time, and the trauma of discovering her body seems to have cauterised his attitude to women for life. What Nott calls “a flippant misogyny” would be his defence mechanism ever after.
As a student in post-war Cambridge, influenced by the doctrines of FR Leavis, he read voraciously and began writing what he later derided as “short Prufrockian poems about disillusioned middle-aged men walking through dead leaves”. This was a heady and happy time, during which he met the two men who awakened and transformed him. One was his best friend Tony White, a handsome loner both tough and tender, always idolised by Gunn as “the full man”, answering to nobody but himself, heroic in his disdain for convention.
The other was Mike Kitay, a gentle and loyal Jewish boy from New Jersey who had come to the university on a scholarship with ambitions to break into the theatre. Kitay and Gunn’s initially passionate love affair weathered all the storms for the next 50 years, settling into a domestic partnership strong enough to accommodate a succession of third parties and passing trade – Gunn described it as “the one thing of value in my whole life”.
: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty images
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