"When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to"
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The chill in Gunn's line is how calmly it describes a real censorship regime without ever naming a censor. He wasn't silenced by law; he was pre-emptively edited by an ecosystem of taste-makers, slush piles, and "good literary sense" that doubled as a gatekeeping machine. The word "probably" is doing tactical work: it's both modest and damning, the kind of hedged certainty you develop when power never has to announce itself. You just learn the rules from the refusals.
Gunn's intent isn't confessional so much as diagnostic. He frames queerness not as private truth waiting to be expressed, but as a social fact that organizes what gets written in the first place. The subtext is a portrait of the young artist calculating risk: how much of the self can be smuggled into the poem without triggering the era's invisible alarms? That calculation doesn't only delay "queer poems"; it shapes style. You can hear a whole aesthetic implied here: indirection, coded desire, the careful architecture of implication.
Context matters: Gunn comes of age mid-century, between British reserve and American literary institutions, before gay liberation rewired public speech. Editors weren't simply prudish; they were guardians of a market and a moral order. The sting is that Gunn isn't claiming victimhood. He's mapping a system where the costs of honesty are paid upfront by the writer, and where acceptance is purchased with self-erasure.
Gunn's intent isn't confessional so much as diagnostic. He frames queerness not as private truth waiting to be expressed, but as a social fact that organizes what gets written in the first place. The subtext is a portrait of the young artist calculating risk: how much of the self can be smuggled into the poem without triggering the era's invisible alarms? That calculation doesn't only delay "queer poems"; it shapes style. You can hear a whole aesthetic implied here: indirection, coded desire, the careful architecture of implication.
Context matters: Gunn comes of age mid-century, between British reserve and American literary institutions, before gay liberation rewired public speech. Editors weren't simply prudish; they were guardians of a market and a moral order. The sting is that Gunn isn't claiming victimhood. He's mapping a system where the costs of honesty are paid upfront by the writer, and where acceptance is purchased with self-erasure.
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| Topic | Poetry |
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