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| Larry Wolf, Slide for Queer History Open Mic (2026) at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives |
For Minor
Have you ever been in love?
Alfred Stieglitz to Minor White, 1946
Let’s begin our story --
A photograph
A man
In an archway
A dark street
Waterfront
Portland
The West Coast Portland
Portland
en route to Seattle
1937
29
Or for me
East Coast
Arriving in Burlington
Green Mountains and a lake
1976
25
Arrived with an Argus
with a Nikon
With a bundle of sonnets
with a sketchbook
Stopped for a few days
for a first real job
That became a few years
that became my entire professional life
We knew what we were looking for
Men
On the waterfront
Cruising
Ancient blood sport? Hunter and hunted?
Ritualistic bonding? Self and other?
Me seeking you
Across decades
Across worlds
Yet
All one world
College behind us
Traveling light
Possessions given away
Or left for safe keeping
That proved not so safe
- the many poems, with a friend, vanish
- boxes mouldering, soaked in a garage
- imperfect archives
Who are you?
A poet
Changing mediums
Changing homes
Traveling with a typewriter
And a camera
And me?
Software for a living
Yet
Also
Typewriter and camera
Companions
Fingertips pounding impressions in paper
Hand-held box of sensitive film
Seeking resonance
… spirit
… unspeakable
Seeking love
Since high school
At least
HOMO sexual
A fight with parents
You left
And returned
And it was never spoken of again
I kept it on the down low
Hidden even from myself
Until
That 21st summer, 1972
Kelly and Al
Two men
So clearly in love
I knew the mathematician
The other?
Cast a warming glow
Together, an existence proof
Opening a door to personal possibility
For you
The heartbreak of ‘33
The Sonnets, winter in ‘36
An unnamed man
Held
Private
Then drafted in a war
Mostly at a desk
Time to write
Retyping the sonnets
You returned to
Your personal battle
Too many times love has come and gone
With too small fulfillment in its wake
For me not to hear in its gay tone
A fugue of tears across the shining lake.
…
I remember the lonely solitudes
The love I have was swept with bitter weather
…
A man desiring men, nothing better dreampt
For the genial exercise of self contempt.
You said there was no time for photography
Yet there are photographs
Tender portraits of men
Comrades
Post-war
The first big exhibition
Those portraits
Poems of war
The gallery said -- too much -- remove the poems
You withdrew it all
Withdrew
Pulled back
Years later
You published
The photographs
The poems
Amputations
In 1947 and ‘48
Tom held your attention
Naked to your gaze
Three bursts of making
A small book of prints
A copy for you
A copy for Tom
Your yearning bleeds from the photographs
Physical
Messy
Intimate
Left to wonder
Were there others?
I too
Keep coming back
Your sonnets
Your photographs
Those beautiful tender male bodies
The photographer-poet exposed
I reach out
Finding you
Your art
In my heart
Another queer life reclaimed
Much love
Rest in joy
Rest in passion
Thank you
Larry Wolf, Chicago (2026)
Notes
Minor White wrote one hundred sonnets during the winter of 1936/37. Eighty-nine of them survive in his archives.
He wrote:
a love affair of short duration, spring of ‘33 probably, left an indelible mark. The Sonnet Sequence … covers the dawn, noon, dusk, and long black night strewn with the barbed wire and thistles of loving a man instead of a woman.
…
The decision to return to photography was based on what had been learned writing verse. I said in effect, "in becoming a photographer I am only changing mediums, the essential core of both verse and photography is poetry."
Minor White, Memorable Fancies (i958/2025)
Credits
Minor White, Arches of the Dodd Building, Southwest Front Avenue and Ankeny Street (1938) New Deal Art Project, U.S. General Services Administration
Minor White, Fragments from Sonnet 9 and Sonnet 21, Sonnet Sequence, Minor White Archive, MWA A 093, Folder 1735 (1937-38), Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey
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