Arnie Kantrowitz, Song of Myself and The Diary of Anne Frank

by Larry Mass

This short essay was commissioned by Bay Area Reporter on the occasion of the publication of Song of Myself: A Novel by Arnie Kantrowitz (9/22/24).

Most who knew Arnie Kantrowitz would describe him as kindhearted, brave, wise, funny and likable. Indeed, Arnie was a mensch with many friends and few enemies.

But along with his renown as a gay sage, writer and activist, Arnie had more than his own share of sorrows, life challenges and rites of passage, which reverberate in the saga of his novel’s fictional protagonist, Daniel Dell Blake.

In fact, Arnie’s Song of Myself is touchingly autobiographical in recreating many situations in his own life, especially those of homophobic abuse, exploitation and cruelty. But true as well to the spirit of Arnie’s real life, Daniel always manages to prevail, never losing hope and an essential faith in the goodness of people. Like Arnie, Daniel learns to deflect life’s sharpest curve balls with an upbeat sensibility, to rebound from hurt and loss with indefatigable optimism.

This irrepressibility of the human spirit rings true for Arnie in his love for Walt Whitman. But also for another writer of his own life and times whose story haunted and inspired him: Anne Frank.

Like Anne, Arnie was sometimes chided for being “sentimental.” The old war films about the heroic sacrifices of ordinary good people would often draw tears from him, no matter how many times he had already seen them. Mrs. Miniver and Goodbye Mr. Chips were favorites.

Yes, Arnie was sweet, sentimental and vulnerable, but these defining characteristics turned out to be the very qualities that fueled his likewise winning grit, self-possession, wicked humor, gay sensibility and pride.

Humor tends to flourish in times and communities of oppression and Arnie was not about to go against type. As both gay and Jewish, Arnie’s edgy stand-up comic persona could vie the best. On getting older, Arnie exuded sage wisdom: “activity is overrated.” On returning home, he was the seasoned Shakespearean: “The couch, the couch. My kingdom for the couch!” As for his unfailing decency and kindness, he waxed philosophical: “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Marcia Pally has described Arnie as “gentle and fierce.” That’s also true of Daniel Dell Blake. Even as he is bullied by his homophobic father, military officers, hustlers and the otherwise snooty and self-important, gay as well as straight, Daniel always manages, with the compass of his own self-regard and the guidance of his spiritual mentor Walt Whitman, to rise above the moment to be true to himself, to love himself and sing his own praises.

Arnie told his actual real-life story in his memoir, Under The Rainbow: Growing Up Gay, widely considered a classic of gay literature, culture and history. Daniel’s story has different adventures and misadventures, fictional recreations that come together to reveal a panorama of pre- and post-Stonewall era gay and American life. Between the lines, both mourn the LGBTQ+ history that remains, as in the eras preceding it and except in fragments, all but completely expunged from public records and memory.

The heartbreak of love that must hide is poignantly experienced by Daniel in Song of Myself, just as it was by Arnie in the wake of his coming of age in Newark, and in his stint as a budding teacher in Cortland, New York — backwaters that were their own kind of death sentences for difference and individuality.

Like too many other battered LGBTQ+ people, Arnie experienced worsening depression and he attempted suicide as he came of age, a fate that likewise pursues Daniel. But in Daniel’s life, as it did in Arnie’s, hope springs eternal in the bright, embracing lights of the bigger city gay epicenters of Manhattan and San Francisco.

Hope that culminates in what we began calling Gay Liberation, a movement Arnie became a standard-bearer for and which launches Daniel into his own future of possibility. Alas, on the heels of that Happy Ending and Beginning came AIDS, with its Civil War levels of devastation for Arnie, Daniel and the whole wide world.

Never again, we keep trying with all our hearts to keep believing, even as Never Again keeps happening again and again, not only for LGBTQ+ peoples and Jews but for minorities and the dispossessed everywhere. But thanks to great souls like Arnie Kantrowitz, Walt Whitman and Anne Frank, and whatever the setbacks, it’s a torch we remain ever more inspired and empowered to carry.

Larry Mass,

New York City, 9/23/24