Christopher Richards describes his passion for the poetry and personal outlook of Frank O’Hara:
What I love about O’Hara is the way that he is camp, because it’s not too camp. It is not camp at all. What his poems declare, to quote his friend [James] Schuyler, is “I just can’t help it, I feel like this.” Certainly other poets have expressed this democracy of taste, this unbridled attraction before him—particularly Whitman, in his own nineteenth-century queer way. As O’Hara once commented to his roommate and sometimes lover, Joe Lesueur, homosexuality wasn’t just about sex, it was about his love of the freedoms that went with it. O’Hara seized on this and sought out what he wanted when he wanted it. As Lesueur describes in his memoir Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, “Frank had at various times both the desire and the determination to make out with a great majority of the people to whom he was attracted, their diversity being truly mind-boggling: big guys, little guys, macho straight men, flagrantly gay men, rough trade, gay trade, friends, friends of friends, offspring of his friends, blonds, blacks, Jews, and—women: Grace Hartigan, for example.” …
His work is filled with unexpected tastes and nearly absent of any sort of hierarchy. Kangaroos? Lovely. Long terrible b-films? Satisfying. Rachmaninoff? Sublime. Drinking coke with a cute guy? The best. O’Hara presides over a democracy of affection.
The Dish 