After serving two years in the army, Jasper Johns returned to New York in 1953 and worked in a bookstore while trying to decide whether he wanted to be a poet or a painter. Within two years he had created iconic images such as Flag and White Flag, and three years after that four of his paintings were in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. From 1955 to 1961, widely considered to be the period of his greatest work, Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were lovers. Although they never spoke about their relationship, they were invited everywhere as a couple. According to Jonathan Katz, Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s relationship was the deepest of their entire lives and “the after-effects were so powerful that both artists left New York for their native South, changed their pictorial styles radically, and neither saw nor spoke to one another for a decade or more.” Indeed, Johns has never talked about it, though Rauschenberg finally discussed it with Interview magazine in 1990. Today, Johns is 81. (photo: Hans Namuth)
Denial wears many faces, and six gaudy rings. Liberace’s titanic flamboyance and volcanic success as a 
popular pianist—with his tv show outranking I Love Lucy, selling more than two million albums in 1953 alone, his entry in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's highest paid musician and pianist, and his two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—was punctuated by his repeated protestations, in court, that he was not a homosexual and had never engaged in a homosexual act. In 1957, he sued a British tabloid for libel for implying he was gay and won $22,000. In 1982, when his live-in boyfriend/chauffeur Scott Thorson sued him for palimony, Liberace continued to claim he had never had sex with a man. Even as he was dying of aids in 1987, he stridently denied he had aids (instead blaming his drastic weight loss on a watermelon diet) and he still maintained he had never had gay sex. In his final months, somehow still believing that his fans were ignorant of his homosexuality, he worried to his manager that if they knew, “that’s all they’ll remember about me.” Very unfortunately, the upcoming Liberace biopic from Steven Soderbergh stars Michael Douglas, but on the plus side, Matt Damon is Thorson.
At the other end of the queer spectrum from Liberace, Adrienne Rich will be remembered for the integrity of her ideas and the power of her poetry, currently 17 volumes, which include Diving Into The Wreck, The Dream of a Common Language, The Fact of a Doorframe, and The School Among the Ruins. Since the 1970s, her work has reflected her life as a lesbian and has been awarded many distinguished prizes: the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. In 1997, she refused to accept the National Medal of Arts because of “the cynical politics of [Bill Clinton’s] administration,” and in 2003 she refused to attend a Bush White House symposium on poetry to protest the impending Iraq War. (In fact, so many poets refused to attend, the event was canceled.) Since 1976, Rich has lived with her partner, writer Michelle Cliff. Last year Rich published a new collection,Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010.
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Posted by: E D | May 16, 2010 at 09:55 PM