Rick Whitaker
The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara
Reading Gay American Writers
With photographs by Iannis Delatolas

""Whitaker offers a collection of literary observations and musings that may be refreshingly germane to both gay and straight readers who have 'suffered the vicissitudes of difference.'" —Publishers Weekly

Linked essays on gay writers including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, and David Wojnarowicz

Rick Whitaker never actually met Frank O'Hara. O'Hara died before he was born, but he got to know him anyway — and all the other writers included here — through the pages of his books. "I met his poetry. It was a cool early spring evening, I believe. I remember that I liked him instantly."

Rick Whitaker has a unique perspective. Those who first met Rick through his unrepentant memoir know that he was not a typical prostitute. This "Wittgenstein- and Freud-quoting" (Paper magazine) hustler is at core a thinker — and a voracious reader (and a book reviewer, for the Washington Post, the New York Times, Salon.com, the New York Observer, among others). In The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara, Whitaker discusses the books that have altered his perception and influenced the way he conducts his life. Not all of Whitaker's favorite books are written by homosexuals or bisexuals, but many — and all included in this volume — are. These sexual outsiders share what Whitaker calls a "gay sensibility."

"It strikes me as obvious that the homo- or bisexuality of each of the writers I have in mind … made an important impact upon the ways they devised to compose poetry and prose literature — both what they chose to write about and how they wrote about it."

Divided into three parts — the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries — The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara follows the arc of literature from the dusty past before many American writers were openly homosexual through the gay-friendly present. In this literary scrapbook of essays Whitaker combines biography, criticism, and personal memoir. It is, as James McCourt, author of Queer Street, puts it, "an elegant and self-possessed romance of the reading life."

Rick Whitaker lives in New York City. He is the author of Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling. Iannis Delatolas is a photographer based in New York City.

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