Kay Gabriel, Perverts

 

And by an enemy lover.
Then I’m on an interminable march
to a coded destination. There’s a chase,
there’s cops, there’s friends.
I’d walk into traffic for them
if I had to, but why do I have to?
I mean why now, and for a hidden purpose.
A thick cluster shouts for power. We briefly
command the attention of the cars,
then the attention of the Post.
Then one of us exists the dreams for Connecticut,
not before the headline writers get
a really good slander in, one of their best.
V and I have our photos taken in matching hats
we were supposed to look like celebrities
in a stairwell under cold light after arguing
all night dressed in garments
from an infamous workshop under the Williamsburg
Bridge. Mel Brooks arrives, he’s the mayor,
we’re allegedly sorry and won’t do it again
payments coming due on bad decisions
“recklessly” making out and writing about it on
the wrong side of the day (“Perverts”)

An experienced reader, I would think, should delight at the thought of a new title by New York City writer and organizer, Kay Gabriel; her Perverts (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), which follows on the heels of A Queen in Bucks County (2022) and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (2023) [see my review of such here], not to mention the anthology she co-edited with Andrea Abi-Karam, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. Favouring the accumulated, book-length lyric, Gabriel’s Perverts is built as a collection structured through two long, extended sequences coupled: the lengthy opening title section, “PERVERTS,” and the shorter, second section, “TRANNIES, by Larry Kramer.” “in a world in which a pervert’s as good as a doctor,” offers the opening section, early on, “as fastidious as gnarly as intrusive in attention [.]” Stretching across a layering of accumulated sections, Gabriel writes through dreams and pop culture, gender and sexuality, Queer thought and nightmares, and references to, among others, Jack Spicer and Alice Notley across what John Keene on the back cover refers to as an “anti-epic for our current moment, bringing contemporary queer community into being with lyric verve amid and in resistance to our ongoing catastrophe.” “Should I summarize? For you, Ranier,” the opening sequence continues, “I kept / my infuriating cool. The dog / was saved, we taught our class, / we replaced the vaguely powerful talisman / with bespoke paper bags. Our students / left us rave reviews.” There is a propulsion to Gabriel’s lyric, one that interweaves an array of threads to hold together a coherent, singular movement forward, across conversation, thought and community. Or, as the “Acknowledgments” at the back of the collection offers, the title sequence “[…] is an exercise in collective capacity. The poem collages my dreams with others’.

Subsequently, the second poem-section, in that same note, “[…] was a joke before it was a poem.” Gabriel plays off the title and purpose of American writer and playwright Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots, a book described as “a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man’s desperate search for permanence, commitment, and love,” it describes New York City during a time before AIDS, writing through the city’s very visible gay community. Across nineteen pages, Gabriel’s extended, accumulated four-part “TRANNIES, by Larry Kramer” responds to Kramer’s novel, both directly and indirectly, composing gestures and declarations as critique and swirling lyric. “God set you up to fail,” part four includes, “and when you took a Xanax after // the underwear party in the Grove // and it bobbed in your throat // like a buoy, that, too, was God, // keeping you awake and making you look like an // ass in front of your slightly square boyfriend, // the trans one who, last time we saw him, was peeking // at the nearby Grindr square and who, // when the swallowed Xanax melted and made you walk // like an uncoordinated puppet into bed, // remembered and cited this incident in his litany of // reasons to dump you, […].” In a recent interview conducted by Shiv Kotecha for BOMB magazine, Gabriel responds:

If the poem were just a fuck-you to Larry Kramer, it could stop after those four words. If it were a paean to his genius, it would be boring. The book started as a joke I made to myself, asking: What if Kramer wrote a novel in 1978 called Trannies instead of Faggots? The first section of the poem introduces a fictional 1978 universe in which there is a highly developed society of transsexuals that has all the kinds of class divisions that the faggots have in Kramer’s Faggots. In both poems, there is an overlapping interest in how desire structures human relationships and questions of shared political constituency. Well before HIV/AIDS, Kramer told gay people they were wrong to want as much as they did and to do as much as they wanted, and literary history retroactively reads Faggots as an ominous warning about AIDS. But it wasn’t that; it was just Kramer finger-wagging and moralizing at a culture he felt deeply ambivalent about and attached to.