God’s Boy: An Interview with Andrew Hahn

I noted a white-hot intensity in the poem “it would have been easier if you died.” It seems that as gay men, we often do not allow ourselves to feel that kind of unbridled love or some of us become servants to it or we sublimate it to drugs or leather or extreme sex. This seems to be more common in gay women and men than their straight counterparts. How can you speak to this experience? Have you gleaned any wisdom from your experiences?

I think there’s this stereotype that gay men “fall in love” quickly, but I think we’re took quick to call it love when I think those feelings are fueled by a specific kind of desire. In my experience, it’s been the desire for someone to want me that drove me into relationships or sex because that’s what I knew how to do. Many of us have a fear of rejection a need to be validated more than straights because we grow in environments that reinforce the misbelief that we’re unlovable and unknowable. We might grow up believing we will be disowned, or kicked out of the house, or homeless, and even killed, and all of these are incredibly valid and too common. We need to make up for the fraught youth. For a moment there was a Twitter discourse about how no one writes about desire like gay men, and that’s a stereotype I’ll gladly take.  

So much of this book is about inter-generational love and it’s overlay with love for some being that transcends the young, the inexperienced or by virtue of the beloved being God. It’s not unlike Blake’s intentional mash-up of innocence and experience. Did you intend to walk such a similar landscape or was that just built into your subject?

I know of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience from undergrad, but it wasn’t something that I intended to reference, even inadvertently. When studying creative nonfiction, I had read my mentor Sue Silverman’s craft book Fearless Confessions, and in it she talks about the Voice of Experience and the Voice of Innocence. Both of these are deeper than the standard “reflection” and “summary.” They are “what we know from our experiences” and “what I didn’t know at the time.” Both of these live in specific moments of scenes or poems, but then there’s the experiences that we go through to build our voices. So I tried to let the landscape build naturally through what I was trying to process at the time and I let what I was learning from Sue guide me there.

So many of your poems speak to the fear of loving and being loved. Within this context of inter-generational love, do you see balanced love as a possibility?

Ooof, that’s a loaded question. In the past I’ve dated men 24 years older and 13 years older, but currently I have been in a relationship with a man 19 years older than me for a year and a half. I have commitment issues. Both of our parents are divorced and remarried. Both of our mothers were addicts. So we bring a lot of baggage to the table. There is a long history of older-younger relationships that serve as a mentor/mentee sort of thing where the older shows the younger the ways of our people. Neil Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall is a good example of this. But in my relationship it’s different. He came out at 39 and I had gone crazy learning as much as I could about our icons, AIDS history, classic movies, etc. Most times I think it’s possible the older man is young-at-heart. In my case, my partner sometimes acts much younger than me, and I much older than him, so there’s a balance in that respect. However economically the scales often shift. I think there will always be a power dynamic to navigate, but it’s not impossible.

Despite the sturm und drang God and his followers impress on the speaker in your poems, he still wants to see romance. Perhaps he seeks it as result of a that spiritual oppression. How do you see high romance serving gay life beyond its presence in poetry? Do you see us gays walk the walk? Or merely dither around and suffer the clichés? 

I’m not particularly interested in seeing queer people conforming to hetero norms in their relationships. We can make them whatever we want them to be. Open relationships work for many couples. And it’s cool for us because open relationships are fairly taboo for straights. I know many gay couples who have the white-picket fence kind of life, but that’s not something I’m particularly interested in.

What poets inspired your work here? I detected an influence from the Pound lineage of poets. It’s curious since your formal training is in non-fiction and your lines read a bit like prose and yet the images peer out at the reader here, too. In particular, the image of stars recurs and resonates in compelling ways but a pathos also burns throughout the flesh and blood of these poems. Can you speak to what shapes your work? 

These poems originally started taking shape because I was writing an essay about being asked to leave a church. I didn’t realize how deep that religious trauma ran. As I contemplated the essay, I found Sam Sax’s Madness, Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem, Franny Choi’s Death By Sex Machine, and Aaron Smith’s Primer, which totally blew me away. Each poet showed me the ropes in their own way. Mostly what I learned is learning to let go of control and be furious and fearless on the page, which is not how I am in real life. 

The recurring images were something that I learned writing prose to help create continuity aside from theme. An image helps ground readers and I thought it was important for the red star to symbolize something to me in a way I could write about authentically. 

The overwhelming sense of masculinity in the book almost feels claustrophobic at times. As gay men, we often feel swept into the cult of masculinity which entraps us. Where might the speakers in these poems get some relief?

Masculinity itself isn’t toxic. It’s being told that boys can’t cry, or that boys should channel our energy into violence, or that boys can’t show sensitivity, etc. that create toxic men. White evangelicalism reinforces the “power” men have over everyone else as some sort of ordainment. So when these men, who have been fully consumed by this “power” meet resistance, they believe they’re entitled to do whatever they need to to get what they want. The speaker meets this resistance in some of the poems. 

As far as relief, I think there are moments where the speaker is alone or with a man who pays him attention in sort of a dream state like the man in “the river: fort lauderdale” or the lover in “the river: lynchburg.” While some of the moments might be painful, I think the speaker feels safe enough to express himself with these men more than he would with dad/dy or even God at times. 

As a gay man, I have often found great models of masculinity, who often go unnoticed or underappreciated, but I mostly felt locked out of them and ended up, at least earlier in my life, in less than less savory company. Do you see anywhere in the culture where to be a man is more balanced?   

It’s hard to meet anyone these days. Thankfully social media has helped connect people from around the world, and I’ve been lucky to meet and make friends with some really wonderful guys. In real life, I’m fortunate to have made quality friends from Liberty who have thought hard about the world and where they fit into it, what kinds of people they want to allow into their spaces, etc. But to answer your question, I think it comes down to who men choose to be and somehow finding likeminded people.

With the younger queer generation redefining gender so amorphously, do you think these codefined straight-family roles will remain? Can we ever really escape the roles the straight world has set out for us? Are they simply too embedded in our psyches? 

I see this discourse already among queer people. There’s this talk (rightfully so) that we can make our relationships whatever we want them to be. I mentioned this earlier, but open relationships are far less taboo in queer relationships. We don’t even flinch when hear about it, yet straight couples seem shocked and surprised. Meanwhile I’ve known straights who are swingers and have to keep it on the DL. In a lot of the queer memoir and fiction I’ve read, the domestic dynamics seem to fall naturally into place. I think this is either because that’s how it’s always been or that’s what the writer wishes. But it’s not like we go around asking each other about roles in the home!

The poems suggest a personality who has been squashed by God if not religion. Where do you stand on God after putting out a book like that?

I really appreciate this question! God and I are like old friends who run into each other at the bar or the grocery store. We used to be really close, and I think it’s no surprise that God (not church) used to be my entire world. I’d talk to God on my walks, in the car, on the couch. I’d ask him questions about the people around me. He’d answer, almost always. And then a church asked me to leave, and then God stopped answering. This sounds like some Old Testament story. But I’m not mad at God. I don’t hate him. I think white evangelicals have a very wrong idea of the God that I knew, and I hope they go away forever.