Leaves of Crabgrass: An Introduction to Song of Myself, a Novel by Arnie Kantrowitz
by Lawrence D. Mass
“To society, I’m some kind of alien weed growing in the wrong soil, but to my mind, I’m the natural vegetation of the American landscape — not the landscaped, evenly manicured kind of grass that’s found in overly cultivated yards, but a wilder sort of crabgrass that defies the best efforts of the gardeners to eradicate it because it’s sturdy and can take root anywhere.”
–Daniel Dell Blake, from the Prologue to Song of Myself: A Novel by Arnie Kantrowitz
The following is a verbatim adaptation of my Introduction (available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLB50aV6icY) at the launch event for Song of Myself, a novel by Arnie Kantrowitz, at the LGBTQ+ Center 9/22/24, hosted by Greg Newton and the Bureau of General Services Queer Division (BGSQD). The event was billed as “Bill Goldstein in Conversation with Larry Mass.”
Thank you, Greg.
Greg and I go way back. We’ve done a number of events here at the bookstore over the years, the last one also with Bill Goldstein.
Respectfully, let me say up front regarding the Middle East that Arnie and I shared heartfelt concern for all civilian casualties alongside hopes for a peaceful two-state solution. Though we believed in Israel’s right to defend itself, we deplored the occupation and settler violence. But justifying and condoning genocidal extremism, whether antisemitic, Islamophobic or any other, are not perspectives we were ever able to be on board with.
In the last week, I must have rewritten that paragraph a hundred times, trying to keep pace with the literally skyrocketing news.
Though we queers, Jews and mixtures of us may have differing perspectives on what I’ve called the Hamas-Israel war, what seems certain is that we will all end up back together again in the same concentration camps we found ourselves in under the Nazis. And swiftly, if the current global stampede to autocracy, mass detentions and deportations keeps gaining momentum.
Ivana Trump was the first to publicly connect Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler, noting in her divorce proceedings for her allegations of rape by her husband that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches on his night-table. It’s an allegation Trump himself has verified, saying it was a gift from a Jewish friend. Ivana is said to have died “accidentally” from a “fall” in her apartment in 2022.
But it’s Arnie Kantrowitz who was the first person in my circles to mention the H word in relation to Trump. “Hitlerian” is the word we used subsequently and continuously to describe what we were witnessing, as, daily, the increasingly intoxicated and virulent ranting, raving, lies, disinformation, climate and science denialism, conspiracy theories, blaming, denigrating, hate- and fear-mongering, threatening, rabble rousing and incitements to violence kept worsening, leading up to the Jan 6 insurrection; all of which is now and yet again full-speed ahead on vilifying immigrants and blacks.
And now it’s JD Vance, Trump’s running mate and avatar, who has described Trump as “America’s Hitler.” Clearly, this comparison isn’t going away. Nor is the very real and dire threat it represents.
Hello. I’m Larry Mass, surviving life partner of Arnie Kantrowitz, who passed away 2 years ago at 81. We were together nearly 40 years. Arnie is the author of the gay classic memoir, Under The Rainbow: Growing Up Gay, and the novel we are celebrating today, Song of Myself, which is being posthumously published.
Arnie is also the author of a biography of Walt Whitman that was part of the Chelsea House Series on Notable Gay and Lesbian Lives.
In the wake of vehement pushback from reactionary morality custodians, this series was discontinued, foretelling of what’s going on in Florida and elsewhere today. So don’t look for Arnie’s wonderful books in classrooms and libraries in these states anytime soon.
I want to thank all of you for being here. Arnie was a shining light of Gay Liberation. There are many people here who knew, loved and cherished Arnie — students, colleagues, family, friends.
Let me take a moment to express special thanks to several individuals. First, and again, thank you Greg, BGSQD and the Center for hosting us.
Thanks to Brian Schwartz, the book’s publication coordinator, to Tatiana Fernandez, the book’s cover designer, and to our publicist, Michele Karlsberg.
I’m grateful, as Arnie himself was, to literary eminence Bill Goldstein. Bill is a longstanding champion of Arnie and his novel. Hopefully, he will update us on his current project, the eagerly awaited authorized biography of Larry Kramer.
And I am most grateful to Patrick Merla, editor of the New York Native, the fabled gay newspaper where so many LGBTQ+ writers cut our literary and activist teeth. Patrick’s wisdom, skills and love for Arnie and gay literature were indispensable to today’s premiere publication event.
Can we please give Patrick a standing ovation for his lifetime of extraordinary service.
Though we were making progress, it always seemed to stop short of being trustworthy. Tolerance, we were learning the hard way, is not the same as acceptance.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the decade plus during which Arnie’s book was composed, Gay Liberation was in its heyday. This was thanks largely to early Stonewall era heroes like Arnie who assumed leadership roles in publicly confronting anti-gay prejudice.
Arnie’s novel fictionally recreates the ignorance, meanness and brutal oppression of those decades from World War 2 through the McCarthy era and on to the early period of AIDS. Daniel Dell Blake, who is unmistakably Arnie Kantrowitz in voice and character, is so abused and neglected by his homophobic lout of a father in small-town America that he volunteers for military service.
After putting his life on the line for his country, enduring years of abuse and torture as a prisoner of war in the South Pacific, he is routed for being homosexual. Subsequently, his not being honorably discharged prevents him from getting a veterans subsidized education and keeps him from obtaining legitimate employment for the rest of his life.
And that’s just at the outset of this gay man’s odyssey of self-discovery in the America Donald Trump wants to make “great” again with a return to the heyday of McCarthyism.
As bad as these dark ages were, Arnie the eternally cockeyed optimist was motivated by an irrepressible childlike belief in himself and humanity. In this he was not unlike Anne Frank, whose Diary he cherished. With Arnie, it was easier to be hopeful that the worst of this history of horrors might finally be passing.
Never Again, we kept saying and trying to believe, even as Never Again kept happening again and again.
And always with the same scapegoats — women, racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, the indigent and handicapped and, yet again, immigrants.
By the way, if I were Dr. Freud, what I’d say about Trump’s obsession with immigrants eating pets is that what it’s really all about is his own fantasies of, well, and in quotes, “eating pussy.” Donald Trump has “EATING PUSSY” on the brain! Is that what was on his mind as “the cat lady” kept dominating him in their debate?
And btw, did she CLOBBER him, or what?!
In the arts, Arnie’s closest friend Vito Russo was making waves with The Celluloid Closet, his landmark study and traveling roadshow of homosexuality and film.
A lot less successful was my own mission to get the worlds of music and opera to deal more forthrightly with gayness and homophobia, as well as with Jewishness and antisemitism.
Arnie’s quest to open the closets of gay literature, and especially that of his beloved spiritual mentor and muse, Walt Whitman, turned out to be comparably fraught.
Though we were making progress, it always seemed to stop short of being trustworthy. Tolerance, we were learning the hard way, is not the same as acceptance.
A recent experience with a gay friend in the media was revealing. He was so disheartened by how far back the the New York Times appeared to be stepping from its affirmation of transgender rights and care that he cancelled his Times subscription.
Despite its overall progress in affirming gay life and culture, the New York Times now appears to be likewise stepping back from affirming that America’s and Democracy’s standardbearing poet, Walt Whitman, was gay. It’s a disturbing development, even if one accepts that the term gay wasn’t one Whitman himself or his contemporaries used.
Meanwhile, we’re now at that same point of book bannings in Florida and southern states that demarcated the onslaught of Nazism in Germany. Moms For Liberty in league with anti-“woke” Fla Gov Ron Desantis have even managed to ban The Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill A Mockingbird.
Remember “Banned in Boston”? How about Banned in Allied White, Christian Nationalist America, Russia and Europe? Well, some version of that is where we seem to be headed, and at breakneck speed.
In the wake of such extremism, what we’re witnessing in the mainstream media with regard to LGBTQ+ culture is a more passive and subtle retrenchment, a growing tightlip-ness not only about the sexuality of Whitman, but other gay artists in the same pantheon of greatness — Michelangelo, Leonardo and Tchaikovsky.
From transgender health care to questions about the sexuality of Whitman and his beloved President Abraham Lincoln, open-mindedness is once again on the run.
In the case of Whitman, this drift seems to have taken its cues from the de-gaying of Whitman by the Walt Whitman Birthplace and Museum in Huntington, L.I. There, you won’t find any mention of Arnie’s book on Whitman or of any scholarly contributions by gay writers such as Mark Doty, Gary Schmidgall and Jonathan Ned Katz.
All of which came to a head with a gay activist zap led by Arnie af the Birthplace’s rededication in 1997. It was Arnie’s last brave public act on the front lines of Gay Liberation.
Just as the words gay, queer and homosexual are nowhere to be found in the Whitman Birthplace Museum, so has any coverage of this controversy been absent in the NYT and mainstream media.
All of which has had the effect of placing Arnie’s novel in today’s greater context of ever-worsening minority relegation and intolerance. Instead of being primarily a chronicle of historical oppression, of how it was to be gay in earlier times, Arnie’s Song of Myself now seems a more cautionary foretelling of how the times are again darkening for all.
The past Arnie captures in his novel now reads more and more like our present and future.
If Daniel Dell Blake, the protagonist of Song of Myself, was naïve about how stacked the odds were against him in seeking to become himself, he now seems likewise unaware of how predictable and ferocious reactionary backlash tends to be.
But just as Whitman, however bludgeoned his spirit by the holocaust of the American Civil War, never lost his belief in humanity, the same was true of Arnie Kantrowitz, even in the face of the Holocaust of World War 2 he so unflinchingly studied and mourned, and that of AIDS, in which he lost our closest extended family members, Vito Russo and NYC Civil Rights pioneer Jim Owles, and countless other friends in community.
In the novel, Daniel is a budding poet whose spiritual muse is Walt Whitman. Having been given a gift that would guide and inspire him for the rest of his life by his lesbian schoolteacher, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Daniel writes poems inspired by Whitman that chart Daniel’s coming of age, and with that the coming of age of Gay Liberation, Democracy and America.
Just as Arnie Kantrowitz wasn’t going to go down with the mean-spiritedness of an ignorant, bullying, disinformation-programmed world, today’s deplorable Project 2025 is not going to go up without a fight. Not even if, as with the American Civil War, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement, the costs turn out to be as high as the stakes.
Nope. Never Again. With the spirits of great heroes like Walt Whitman and Arnie Kantrowitz to guide us, and like people in recovery, we belong to the No Matter What club. Like the crabgrass Daniel evokes in the prologue to Song of Myself, we keep coming back. No matter what. NO MATTER WHAT!
All of which is to give some sense of the currents of Arnie’s novel, a body of experience and sensibility electrified by Arnie’s legendary spirit of wicked humor, lovingkindness, sagacity and courage.
Picaresque and bawdy, Song of Myself is a saga filled with adventure, sensuality, humanity and resilience. At its heart, as he was so deeply in Arnie’s soul, was the Great Gay Poet of America, Democracy and Sexual Liberation, Walt Whitman.
In seeking to tell the story of Whitman’s life as a gay man’s odyssey of self-discovery, Arnie Kantrowitz ends up telling his own story. And ours.
_______________
To conclude, I’m going to read 3 short passages by Daniel Dell Blake, the protagonist of Song of Myself. The first is from the novel’s Prologue, followed by 2 of Daniel’s poems.
The life I was originally expected to lead was a dull one, confined to the small town of Elysium, New York, where I was born. But somehow my years have been spread all along the American continent (along with an ill-fated soujourn in a hell of a paradise known as the South Pacific), and I’ve managed to have more than my share of exotic adventures. Without even trying, I have been an outrage to my family, my church, and my nation, but never to myself or those I love. To society, I’m some kind of alien weed growing in the wrong soil, but to my mind, I’m the natural vegetation of the American landscape — not the landscaped, evenly manicured kind of grass that’s found in overly cultivated yards, but a wilder sort of crabgrass that defies the best efforts of the gardeners to eradicate it because it’s sturdy and can take root anywhere.
Walt Whitman in World War II
Walt Whitman shook
like a leaf in World War II.
The terror alone enthralled him,
taught him the enormity of fear,
the world exploding all around
and no sure place to set a foot,
the necessity of murder, and
the necessity of forgiving.
He dressed himself in khaki
and rode in a Sherman tank.
He made adequate lists of atrocities.
He loved to fancy himself a Jew in Auschwitz, which caused him great mystic pain and ecstasy. He imagined he would never survive
the war and the bitterness that was its fruit.
It strained his faith to think
that the heights of goodness and joy
could equal these depths of terror and sorrow.
But he did survive.
He changed, of course, but he survived.
He crops up everywhere, like welcome weeds. He reminds us to love war;
it is a chance to strive.
Style is the only matter in times like these, when the spirit quivers
and applauds the wisdom of all struggle.The Holocaust was a university of horror and hate, and Walt Whitman loved its lessons.
World War II was just fine with him,
and so was every destruction that followed it,one after another,
down to the last dead toad,
in which he discovered quintillions of joys.
Looking for Walt Whitman at the Baths
Where did you come from, Walt Whitman, old drifter, old dreamer, old master,
old mentor, where are you fromWhere but inside me, musing and pregnant, summoned out of the dark and the silence,puddled in corners of motherless minds,
tingling with wonder, with warmth and with wisdom and sorrowfully thinking your innocence lied? And where arc you now, Walt Whitman, old father, old child, old brother,
old comrade, where are you now?
Where but inside me, singing your love songs, tinkling and vague like wind chimes on water, where could you be but in paradise buried, here in a thousand bedrooms a day,’
where men entice and comfort men, encouraging, touching men with words, with caring, with fingers, with licking and sucking and fucking and finally fountains of sperm?And where will you be, Walt Whitman, old husband, old lover, old prophet,
old poet, where will you be
when the sun hangs dead at last in the sky?Where but inside me, smiling sagely, certain like childhood, like limitless fancy, like music remembered,
like lust at sunrise,
where will you be?
