| In the dissertation, I use Frank O'Hara and his work to consider aspects of contemporary American Literature and culture in the context of specific queer bodies and language. Looking for O'Hara's presence in places supposedly where it is not, I examine the ambiguities of fame, vocalization, and the memorial by assembling a scrapbook of figures, some of them all-but-lost: writers (Frank O'Hara; John Ashbery), movie and television personalities (Paul Lynde; Jack Cole), and modes of discourse ("dish"; the collection; the "staunch"). The formulation of such a scrapbook allows me to participate with a growing number of critics in exploring the boundaries of literary criticism and autobiography when they intersect with what is designated as the "queer.";In the first chapter, I discuss Frank O'Hara's long poem, "Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)," in order to produce a queer theory of autobiographical reading and writing. My second chapter analyzes the voicing and silencing of homosexuality by looking at the career and presence of "Hollywood Square" comedian, Paul Lynde, whose life parallels O'Hara's. I argue that Lynde embodied a "voice" of homosexuality which had to speak for and against itself and the body from which it emanated. There follows a coda which shows how the alimentary, the joke, and the pathetic combine in the work and poetry of both O'Hara and Lynde. In my fourth chapter, I investigate "dish," a queer talking against extinction which subverts standard notions of history; O'Hara often drew upon the inflections of "dish" in his own work. In my fifth chapter, I examine "juxtaposition," and I juxtapose the afterimage of Hollywood choreographer and performer Jack Cole with a study of gay argot for masturbation. My sixth chapter builds upon this analysis of juxtaposition to consider excess and the memorial in relation to collecting, specifically, contemporary gay photography collecting. Finally, in my last chapter, I collect many of the dissertation's concerns about memorialization by arguing that John Ashbery's Flow Chart is both his queerest poetic performance and a remembrance of O'Hara's voice, among others. |
