News at Eleven: In his poetry, [Frank] Bidart has been open

about being gay at least since "Desire"; now he remembers how the meaning of homosexuality has changed. "For each gay kid whose adolescence/was America in the forties or fifties," he writes in a poem called "Queer," "the primary, the crucial/scenario/forever is coming out--/or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not." The process of coming out--of declaring and claiming one's own desires, so that one might not be ashamed to fulfill them--is for Bidart never over: sometimes he writes with such anger that it sounds like something just begun.

from The New York Times: Extreme States of Mind

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