Queer n There	Queer n There Archive

Did Gerry Gomez Pearlberg really mean to offend gay cat lovers down to their very marrow? Pearlberg's new anthology, Homopup: Queer Dog Poetry (Cleis Press, 143 pages, $10) doesn't just honor gay people's relationships to dogs, but insinuates canines at the very center of queer existence. Are cats, like, history?

"The reasons for this poetry collection are like dogs themselves — earnest and unadorned," declares Pearlberg, who punched "dogs" and "queer" into a sort of poetic Google. The filtered results include morsels from WH Auden, Dennis Cooper, Langston Hughes, May Sarton and Gertrude Stein, as well as worthy voices less renowned. Such is the topic's allure that when Pearlberg put out the call for contributors, even cat people replied in rhyme and meter.

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"Poetry and dogs share a number of qualities — they're both immediate, temporal, social creatures; they are souls laid bare for all the world to see, yet full of hidden implication," avers Pearlberg, who lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at New York's AIDS Service Center.

Poem as dog? Dog as gay? Similes stretched too far? Yet dogs are the first sex-pigs most of us encounter, with their remarkable affinity for licking cocks, sniffing assholes, and mounting legs and backsides irrespective of species or gender. No prissy boxes and dustless litter for them — dogs do it unselfconsciously in the bushes, or right on the path. Like archives buried in salt mines, dogdom is maybe gay life's ultimate repository: were gays ever the target of a diabolical final solution, gay sexual culture could reignite in a new generation attentive to the doings of dogs.

Dipping her bucket into a shallow well, the poems (and occasional essay-ettte) in Homopup are variously successful.

Jack Anderson's "Dogged Love" plots the relationship of two men sparked by the mutual attraction of their dogs — the only bond to survive the couple's messy breakup. (Can poems be optioned to Hollywood?)

In Ana Marie Castañon's "The Same Dogs" two lost canines wander perilously onto a highway and become symbols of life's fragility and generosity.

An excerpt from Mark Doty's Atlantis limns a lover's sickness through the shifting emotions kindled by their dog Arden.

Human bonds and obligations are sometimes best grasped in miniature by reflection in a pet's eyes. What does man owe his best friend? Auden, in a memorial to his dog run down by a car, sums it up:

From us, of course,
you want gristly bones
and to be led through
exciting odorscapes
— their colors don't matter —
with the chance
of a rabbit to chase
or of meeting
a fellow arse-hole
to snuzzle at.

It's all Whitmanesque and comradely in a way that makes the wily, calculating cat seem positively pre-Stonewall.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com