SOURCE: Kikel, Rudy. “The Gay Frank O'Hara.” In Frank O'Hara: To Be True to a City, edited by Jim Elledge, pp. 334-49. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.

In the following essay, originally published in 1978, Kikel discusses O'Hara as a gay poet.

The stream seems to have spilled itself out, the stream that (after the freak Fire Island beach accident ending his life, in 1966, at the age of forty) delivered Frank O'Hara over to us—or us to him, those of us who had not been his already—the stream that has had at its editorial source the tireless efforts of poet and anthologist Donald Allen, from whose hands we have five hundred pages of Collected Poems (Knopf, 1971),¹ selections from them (1974), and three books care of the Grey Fox Press in Bolinas, California: Standing Still and Walking in New York, 1975, a volume of his fugitive art criticism and...