The queer life of Dylan Thomas
Did the famous Welsh poet have a secret?
That I see, there is no discussion of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as queer, and I am trying to figure out why I read him this way. I’m going through his life.
He was born in 1914. “Sex — male, I think,” he writes in a letter. I remember thinking that about myself.
I think about a portrait of him done in 1934 by a friend, on view at the National Museums and Galleries of Wales. I wonder what it says.
He left school early to begin work as a journalist, while honing his poetry.
Since very young, he had a bold voice, saying odd things like, “And death shall have no dominion.” The next part isn’t recalled as often.
“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one…”
He was well-known for anti-queer remarks.
Here he is in a 1933 letter, going on about people he sees around him:
“Sodomhipped young men, with the inevitable sidewhiskers and cigarettes, the faulty livers and the stained teeth…”
The following month he wrote in a letter of:
“…the terrible young men of this generation, the willing-buttocked, celluloid-trousered, degenerates…”
But then he got to know some gay men rather well.
I’m reading a 2005 biography, Dylan Thomas: A New Life, Andrew Lycett narrates that Thomas arrived in London and “became more relaxed about homosexuals,” saying he made some gay friends and then indicating some kind of intimate scene.
I track down Lycett’s reference here, and it comes from a 1977 biography of Thomas by Paul Ferris. He relates that when Thomas visited London he stayed with friends, a gay couple, Oswell Blakeston and Max Chapman, who both became well-known artists.
It appears that each man was sexual with Thomas, separately.
Blakeston would later recall the scenes: “Maybe the whole thing was an act to please one. That would have been much more likely. But he was in bed with me.”
Chapman only recalls that he and Thomas had been kissing. As he put it:
“My own experience is really based on one boozy evening, the first, when affectionate expression went beyond accepted bounds and physical contacts of a kind were reciprocated. All we ever did was feel under the table and do some kissing, french-kissing. You wouldn’t say he was a queer, but he wasn’t averse to being affectionate to his own sex if he found them in some way interesting.”
Was Dylan Thomas gay? Chapman just said he was “just generally warm and sexual rather than disposed one way or another.”
Thomas became a well-known womanizer.
But like many “well-known” facts, this one tends to dissipate on any examination. In 2003, biographer Paul Ferris, after his biography was published, managed to track down one of Thomas’ “lovers” from back in 1943. Such information would be typically concealed, but she talked about their bond really not being so erotic. As she put it:
“It wasn’t a passionate relationship. I wouldn’t say Dylan was all that highly sexed. He liked women and he didn’t like being alone. He was at ease with me because I was Welsh. He used to say, ‘Uncle Dylan is going to bed with his Auntie Babs.’ He had a thing about aunts.’”
Thomas married a woman and they had a daughter.
It was a bizarre marriage. The daughter, Caitlyn, later recalls her mother: “She was jealous of his fame. She kept insisting she had never been in love with him.”
In a 1982 memoir, Caitlyn Thomas called their relationship not a love story but “a drink story.”
Along the way, Thomas was recalled as socially intimate with men in a very unusual way. “He was the only person other than family who would kiss me full on the lips when we met,” recalled John Arlett, a co-worker and friend.
He was a flamboyant dresser.
This is not a theme a typical Dylan Thomas fan probably holds in mind but there it is in a 1964 biography, The Days of Dylan Thomas by Bill Read:
“Dylan seemed to his hostess to be touchingly clothes-conscious; he liked to wear a handsome sweater his mother had knitted for him with the flamboyant scarf that had belonged to his sister. He worked steadily on poems and stories, and, at the persuasion of Mrs. Henderson, listened to records. He was not especially moved by music, but at Easter he did hear through the St. Matthew Passion which, he said, he found to be a wonderful and at the same time very homosexual love story.”
I’m trying to follow along here. He loved wearing a sweater his mother knitted for him, with a lovely scarf he’d added to the look. He sat writing while listening to classical music, and hearing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion reflected on Jesus being homosexual.
Thomas certainly wasn’t fond of women.
In a 2001 essay, the scholar Katie Yvonne Gramich noted the “numerous and embarrassing instances of Thomas’s misogyny…”
But then she notes that Thomas was given to feminine touches in his writing. She identifies his aesthetic as bisexual, or non-sexual?—like his poems about fetuses whose sex isn’t yet known, and also “the feminization of the Christ figure, and in the ambiguous pronouncements about gender continually made in the letters.”
That Dylan Thomas wrote images of a female Christ is noted by others. But literary criticism on him is a lot. I try to get through the book that finds him yearning “to return to the blissful state of suckling at the mother’s breast.”
In New York he seemed rather…gay.
In 1949 he was there to do some poetry readings. His handler in town was the poet and critic John Malcolm Brinnin, who was gay. As Lycett narrates, in one scene a drunk Dylan Thomas was chatting with a group at lunch, and lamented, “How can I know what I like until I find out what I want?”
Asked what he ‘wanted’, he “poked his finger into Brinnin” and said: “I want him.” After a silence, then laughter, Dylan added to Brinnin: “You couldn’t manage to change your sex a bit, could you?”
Lycett adds:
“At least that was the way Brinnin told the story in an unpublished fragment of his memoirs. Whether this was a piece of gay wishful thinking is difficult to tell. Certainly Caitlin came to think that there was an element of homosexual love in Brinnin’s developing relationship with her husband.”
The relationship is portrayed in a 2014 movie, Set Fire to the Stars, in which Elijah Wood is Brinnin. Here the Dylan Thomas character says: “Kiss me! Take me to bed!” But Brinnin was too polite.
The final scenes of Thomas’ life do make one wonder?
I try to take in the profusion of details. Lycett narrates:
“However when she started speculating if someone was homosexual, saying it was difficult to tell, he became agitated. He said he thought he was going mad and he was concerned that it might be because he was homosexual himself, and always had been. On his way back from a cigarette machine, he noticed a young couple kissing and spat out, ‘How filthy’. When she remarked he sounded like a Puritan, he replied, ‘I am a Puritan,’ as if discovering something about himself for the first time. He later declared that perhaps the ‘right doctor’ might be able to help him. When Liz told Brinnin about this incident, she said Dylan could not even utter the word ‘psychiatrist’ and added, ‘I couldn’t help thinking this nice specialist he had in mind was his own father — the dying man he wanted to confess to and get absolution from.’ She described his condition as ‘homosexual panic’, which, as a woman of the world, she had found in half the men she had known. When Brinnin wondered if Dylan’s incessant lunging after women had anything to do with this, she reassured him: ‘If it’s his performance in bed you’re worried about, don’t. You have my word for it.’”
I’m trying to understand: Dylan Thomas was flirting with Brinnin, who wonders if the poet’s lunging at women has a gay subtext. Brinnin’s assistant, Liz Reitell, who’s having an affair with Thomas, assures him Thomas is all man in bed.
A chronic alcoholic—good in bed? Or a woman covering for him.
At age 39, Thomas staggered back to his hotel room.
As Lycett narrates: “he threw himself on his bed and made a gloomy speech about being a ‘filthy, undignified creature’.”
I look up Lycett’s source, a 1955 book, Dylan Thomas in America, which has a little more detail:
“Back in his room he fell upon the bed, saying, ‘What a filthy, undignified creature I am,’ and remarking upon the ‘awful’ occasion of his ‘wretched age.’ Unwilling to let him sink any further into despair, Liz spoke to him firmly, begging him to do something to save himself, to fight against the terrors that were slowly overwhelming him.”
I wonder if the poet who preached “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light” was, all along, raging at himself. 🔶
