Gay/Poet/Korea – these were the first three words I typed into a search engine prior to undertaking the Cordite/Asialink residency in Seoul, South Korea. I’d typed these three words out of genuine interest in each – both singularly and collectively – but also out of a kind of frustration, having first consulted the section for gay travellers in the Lonely Planet guidebook:

In a country like South Korea, where social pressures to conform to a rigid standard of ‘normality’ are intense, it’s not surprising to learn that Koreans are intolerant of homosexual behavior. Lack of tolerance is hardly unique to Korea, but what is interesting is the lengths to which Koreans will go to deny, dismiss or rationalize the existence of gay and lesbian relationships. For most of mainstream Korea, homosexuality is a) non-existent or so rare that it’s hardly worth mentioning (so don’t); b) a freakish crime against nature; c) the manifestation of a debilitating mental illness; or d) a social problem caused by foreigners.

This section goes on to suggest that things are changing in South Korea, though it fails to state these changes as categorically as it does opposition to them. Perhaps this failure highlights the great disparity between a thing “changing” and a thing having “changed” but what of the subtle negotiations taking place daily for those that would benefit most from change?

And so, the search for more information.

Gay/Poet/Korea – it is not lost on me that with these three words I might well have been searching for myself, attempting to locate myself in a new context, a new country, but in the end the search produced Gi Hyeong-do.

Gi Hyeong-do: A Misunderstood Modern Gay Korean Poet was the heading. An article with a concise overview of his short but eventful life, from his impoverished beginnings, his father’s cerebral palsy, the death of his elder sister, his academic success and time as a journalist to his death at the age of twenty-nine in gay sex venue. A venue more often than not euphemistically referred to as a “movie theater”.

Three of Gi’s poems – ‘Grass’, ‘Front of the Bar’ and ‘Dead Cloud’ – accompanied the article. With the first four lines from ‘Grass’, my interest peaked:

I have an appendix but
I don’t like eating grass
I am
a poor excuse for an animal

Whilst in Seoul, I sought out the translator of these poems, Gabriel Sylvian, in an effort to further understand the significance and impact of Gi’s work in South Korea, the subtle negotiations inherent in the translation process and the assertion of homosexuality as a fundamental and formative reality for Gi, a reality that shaped the narrative of his life and work.

TJ: Gabriel how and when did you first come into contact with Gi Hyeong-do’s poetry?

GS: The first time I heard Gi’s name in connection with gay poetry was seven years ago, at a gay bar called “Contact” near Hongik University Station. It was a karaoke bar (actually ‘dive’) in the basement of a run-down building a few blocks from where the Commission houses its grantees. I’d just arrived back in Seoul after ten years and was trying to get some sort of political project underway. After researching during the day, I’d go alone to the bar and hang out. Small groups of customers would come straggling into the bar after midnight for their second or third round of drinks and, just by chance, I got to know some poets and one or two teachers. One guy, a Korean literature teacher at a high school, mentioned Gi’s name in passing. “Gi” is a rare family name in Korea, so at first I misheard it as “Gim”. It was a few days before I figured out his name, surprisingly written with the Chinese character for “strange” (laughs). His work wasn’t hard to find since his Complete Works had come out five years before. I just borrowed the book from the library and started reading.

TJ: When did you first decide that you were going to translate his work?

Once I got the book, I began with the shorter pieces, trying to get a quick sense of his style, themes, something. One of the shorter poems appearing near the beginning of the collection is titled “College Days”. It describes a college student, a loner intellectual, reading Plato on the school steps, or hiding in a grove of laurel trees at the rear of campus while shots sound in the distance. I checked the poet’s bio and saw he was a Yonsei student.

The shots, of course, refer to the clashes between student demonstrators and riot police that were a regular feature of campus life during the Jeon Du-hwan era. I’d lived just a five minute walk from that grove in the mid-1980s, in a Western-style house for international students near the university’s back gate. History professor Milan Hetjmanek, now at SNU, was teaching at the International Division that year, and Richard Krebill was our de facto house mentor. So I knew that grove, the old red-brick structures in the background of Gi’s graduation photos, and that same horrible sound. Yonsei University was a hotbed for student activism then. Classes were frequently cancelled due to tear gas explosions. None of we foreign students were psychologically prepared for it all. It all came back to me with that poem. The poem affects everyone who was a student in Seoul at that time in the same way, I think.

Gay cruising in Seoul was like a darkness within a darkness. You felt steeped in criminality at all times. Nobody really trusted anyone else. You had to keep your bag close to you or it would get stolen (laughs). Gi’s poems are dark and at first I just thought he was a depressed poet, maybe gay, maybe not. Later, when I found out through an article that Gi had died at the Pagoda Theatre, things came together more clearly to form a composite picture. So early on, by virtue a few coincidences in our backgrounds, it was easy to feel that I should try to translate his work. From that point I started thinking about how Gi’s life and art might be integrated into a political project.

TJ: There seems to be a great deal of conjecture surrounding the suggestion that Gi Hyeong-do was homosexual, even though he died in a gay cinema. What is your take on Korea’s inability, despite this fact alone, to even raise it as a question?

The call for “proof” is a central problem that the project has had to grapple with. The intellectuals in the gay community have always claimed Gi as one of their own, but I have sought proof. While translating his poems, I read everything Gi wrote, including essays and fiction, and every academic article, criticism and reminiscence written about him I could find. There’s not that much, really. Maybe less than one hundred articles. Except for one essay appearing in a book on postmodern Korean culture published in Europe, I found no mention of Gi’s sexuality anywhere in print.

TJ: That sounds extraordinary, but I’m guessing it was no shock to you?

Well, who would ever expect to find a study of any Korean poet’s sexuality, gay or straight, or even poetry about sex? There were, of course, wild exceptions to the rule. Poet/novelist Ma Gwangsu, popularising Freud and free sex back in the 1980s, was arrested and tried by the Korean government on morals charges for, among other things, including scenes of homosexuality in his work. Then there was poet/novelist Jang Jeong-il in the late 1980s and 1990s. Similar charges were brought against him, too, by the courts in the 1990s. Tellingly, Gi did not shun, but showed an active interest in both writers. This is important background information to consider when thinking about Gi and same-sex sexuality in his literature. As for Gi the man? In the various recollections written about Gi by his colleagues, and in the testimonies of those whom I’ve interviewed (none of whom, by the way, seemed to know Gi very well – he seems to have been very private and is described as a loner), there are clues that stand out to the gay investigator and which support the theory of a same-sex orientation.

TJ: Can you elaborate on this a bit further, or highlight some of these “clues” for us?

Everyone I’ve met who knew Gi personally, for example, describes his speaking style as very effeminate. His taste in clothing was also consistent with an effeminate man’s tastes. He was known for his fastidiousness, meticulousness. Also, his family dynamic fit the classic stereotype of strong mother / weak father. Now in his prose, Gi once or twice mentions his own weakness, his “effeminacy”, in building relationships with women (though I think tellingly, never in his poetry, where the object of desire or address is “the friend” or “you”) and this has been suggested by some as “proof” that Gi loved women, negating the possibility of his being a homosexual.

First of all, anyone familiar with the Korean gay community – even today – knows that Korean gay men marry and have children. Some desire a conventional family, and sometimes this desire stems from social pressure. Marriage and family is what has been expected of all able-bodied men and in many cases, not doing so would mean being stigmatization as a social failure. From my interviews, I’ve found married gay men love their families but they feel this is not enough to satisfy them emotionally and sexually. How much more was this the case in the 1980s, when Gi was writing, than today? Before sexual politics.

The gay-straight dichotomy we so “naturally” internalize as gay men today is blurred where identity politics has not taken root. This is especially true of men who were of Gi’s generation and older. So it is naïve, a mistake, to expect Gi to conform to present-day notions of a self-consciously queer poet with a solid sexual identity structure. Again, it bears repeating that gay Korean poets writing in the mainstream today, in 2011, are still not at liberty to publish same-sex poetry for their public readership. None of the poets I met at “Contact” or elsewhere did. They didn’t dare try, nor any of their gay poet friends. So we certainly could not expect Gi to have done so. Directly, that is.

TJ: Is this changing at all?

It is now, but Gi was writing, after all, on the cusp of a newly-democratizing Korea before the onset of 1990s liberalism and queer politics. These facts, along with the fact that he died in a notorious gay sex venue. (And we all know that nobody gets caught the first time!) Then, there is his poetry.

TJ: … which is as much a product of his sexuality, as it is the political and social climate within which it was written?

I think that the key to understanding Gi as a same-sex desiring poet thus lies in grasping what it was like for same-sex desiring men in pre-democratic (pre-1987) Korea, in the days before the Internet; and even more to the point, what it was like to be a Korean intellectual in that period, bearing the burden of those yearnings. In a society where no space existed to articulate such desires outside of a dank theatre, a shabby yeogwan (inn), a bus station toilet, or a dusky park, who could write such a voice directly? No one. I think what Gi’s poetry reveals is that, like Walt Whitman in nineteenth century America, he couldn’t tell the truth and neither could he lie. The result is an intensely personal poetry shot through with existential trauma. To me, Gi reads like a trauma patient. Painfully sensitive as we infer from his poems, so delicate a sensibility; yet his soul had to navigate the crudest of social conditions (from without what Koreans viewed as “acceptable”) in search of love. Gi thematized his personal illness, urban poverty, bleak family history — a broad range of depressing subject matter — but deep pain seems to come from broken relationships and loneliness.

So Gi, while a sort of innovator, was still very much a product of his time. That he referenced his sexuality at all (gay men find all the allusions) really can be viewed as a wonder. Same-sex love in the decades before the 1990s was a forbidden topic and disparaged as “namsaek” (男色) or as the foreign decadence called “gei”, neither salutary terms. “Sex” broadly meant cross-sex sexuality only. When Gi was writing, there was only one word in the Korean language, “seong” (性 ‘sex’) to cover all the current concepts of sex, gender, sexuality – and no other words were felt as needed. Postmodernisation of sex came to Korea in the 1990s, and the new extended vocabulary for sex that came with it enabled a conceptual expansion of sex to embrace a “healthy” same-sex desire. Not surprisingly, the Korean gay lib movement first materialized on college campuses among the young gay intellectuals.

So to sum up my answer, while there has always been a rumour about Gi’s homosexuality since his death, a discursive space within academia – Korea’s marginalized gay politics notwithstanding – has heretofore never existed by which to investigate the topic of Gi’s sexuality in relation to his life and art, nor has the motivation existed to create one. That’s why I chose to call the project KARMA (Ki ARt ReMApping) (‘Ki’ = McCune Reischauer Romanization system, ‘Gi’ = current Romanization system). The desired goal is to spark motivation within academe for a Korean scholarship that can come to terms with, embrace, sexual diversity; and at the same time, serve justice and homage to Gi’s spirit, with revolutionary implications for those who live in this era.

TJ: Can you tell me a bit about the translation process? Are there areas of difficulty when translating from Korean into English that are particular to the Korean language?

Well, Gi’s poetry is not easy to recreate in a foreign language. Putting his verses into English has called for revision after revision after revision. Because his poems are so intensely personal, knowing the facts of his life is important, as well as the major events, tropes, even visual panoramas of Korea in the 80s. On the technical side, the poet’s non-use of punctuation marks complicates smooth line breaks and phrasings in the corresponding translations.

He’ll also make things tougher by packing a line with a string of complex metaphors, like his poem “Discharged Soldier”; or cleverly wed opposing concepts, resulting in unexpected but striking correlatives (Gi, by the way, draws deeply from the well of Eliot’s fin de siecle mood), little tricks which don’t always lend themselves to seamless translation. Stylistic idiosyncrasies that make the translator reach for the aspirin bottle. Another difficulty lies in maintaining the stamina to stay in his world for extended periods of time. With so much gloom to face on every page, I would have to take long breaks.

TJ: It seems, to my mind, that a significant part of the translation process, in this particular instance, might have been to shine a light on a homosexual subtext in the poems, something you’ve already touched on. But what in Gi’s poems characterises such a subtext? How are these same-sex themes manifested in the work?

Remapping Ki is, and has been from the beginning, part of a broader project to carry out what I told the Commission I was going to try to do – namely, get the ball rolling in terms of making Korean Gay Literature a social reality, one of the strategies being to first internationalize it, then bring it back home to roost.

In that connection, I liked one of Yoko Tawada’s remarks in the paper she delivered at the Seoul International Forum for Literature last week. Tawada noted that sometimes, after a literary work has been forgotten for a time to readers of its original language, it can gain a new life in a completely different cultural area through translation, and then make a comeback in its country of origin. She observed, “Sometimes when people come home after a long journey, their faces look different”. That’s the idea: for Gi to reappear to Koreans with a more multihued countenance than the one he now shows, a face so far concealed by what has seemed a pointless death, , a face that has finally emerged from that theatre balcony. A face with perhaps new meaning for life.

TJ: And for Koreans too?

I’ve often thought that a full-on discussion of sexuality in his literature could effect a reversal, could bring new meaning to the portentous line that has intrigued so many people, “Until my pristine death is confirmed, I will not exist”. The circumstances of Gi’s death are far from what most would call ‘pristine’, or even human in the traditional Confucian view. And that’s part of the interpretive problem, according to the LGBT perspective. Koreans still don’t have a lens with which to view gay people except as murky shadows, liminal existences. This is apparent in most same-sex themed novels and plays produced here since the 1990s until very recently.

TJ: It’s been suggested that Gi “chose” his death. What’s your response to this?

Of course, the notion circulated by some critics that Gi “chose” his death is ridiculous. That shows their ignorance, their contempt for the gay community. I think some gay men would prefer to die in a cheap sex theatre than in a public society that condemns or ignores him. But anyway, haven’t many of the saints suffered “horrible” deaths? It might be my Catholic upbringing (laughs) but I think we should raise Gi up to something much more worthy of his life and experiences and, if possible, say something powerful about Korea’s LGBTs and their history, in the process. Gi is naturally part of the project’s agenda. Why shouldn’t he be?

But back to your question about how same-sex themes are manifested in the poetry. As you might expect, it is not always as simple as making a list of related elements, ad hoc, and setting them against the unrelated elements. Rather, it is a gestalt: everything converges, bleeds together to form a composite picture.

TJ: But even within this composite picture, as with Whitman’s poetry, there must be some markers?

I guess the problem of locating same-sex themes in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass presents LGBT critics with similar challenges. Matters aren’t so “cut and dried” (to extend the metaphor) for critiquing Gi’s poetry compared to, say, C.P. Cavafy or Thom Gunn. Can we refer to a “gay aesthetic”, or a universal “gay episteme”? If pressed to show examples today, I would say the gay subtexts in Gi’s poems are marked by the absence of a female love object, as mentioned before, the “friend” being the addressee of the poet’s hopes and passions. The passivity of the subject in his intimate relations; implied or stated. The rigid narcissism. An exaggerated fear of physical aging (Dorian Gray, eternal bane to gay men) and an old age leaving the subject lonely and bitter. Fear, and some might say castration anxiety, in respect to his overbearing mother, coupled with a mournful yet intimate identification with his sickly, ineffectual father.

This point resonated with me deeply. One can even read, I believe, a subtly incestuous dynamic between father and son. But again, it’s not so much the individual themes themselves but their distillation into a general worldview. I agree with David McCann that it is Gi’s point of view that sets him apart from his contemporaries. But it’s also fair to ask what social maladies may have conditioned that uniqueness, that way of seeing and singing the world that appears so differently from everyone else.

Yes, the shadowy world of Seoul’s streets and alleyways was occupied by everyone; but let’s also look at the oblique and not-so oblique references to sexual encounters, the secretive broken relationships, a life spent chasing uselessly after desire…. growing old, spiritually, before one’s time. Not only the sharp social and political critiques that ally him with his contemporaries – what uniqueness lies there? – but his cloaked despair, his muted resentment …

TJ: Would you say that Gi is an anomaly in Korean literature?

There is simply no other poet like Gi in Korean literature [except perhaps Choe Seung-ja, whom I’ll touch on later] and it was the raw, negative energy stemming from the totality of his experience that ultimately had a deep and lasting impact on Korean poets emerging in the 1990s. Based on the facts gleaned from his personal life, my interpretation is that the utter pessimism of Black Leaf in My Mouth (the title of his poetry collection) is squarely rooted in life in the shady Jongro underground where the yearning heart is trampled and the soul perishes in silence and in secret.

In poetic terms, this was Gi’s living death. To the world’s eyes, Gi had all the ingredients of success: a good education, a stable job, a fine brain, good looks – he is the only handsome Korean poet of the entire decade. So I ask, whence the existential anguish? Over and over I read that Gi’s colleagues couldn’t believe how negative and depressing his poetry was when they first read it. And still today, it confounds people unaware of his covert sexuality. Not too long ago, a critic and minor acquaintance of Gi’s said in a Munhak Sasang journal article that Gi’s negativity must all have been a “pose”, that there could be no real substance behind it. Outrageous! These men are blind to Gi’s agonies because they are blind to sexual minorities. But those agonies have a pointed resonance, I believe, for gay readers, Korean and foreign. Did you not find that so?

TJ: Yes. Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s myself – albeit in another country and culture, pre-internet, pre the kind of technological and social access we now have to that milieu – Gi’s poems have particular resonance for me in that they are written in a language I speak. By this I do not mean the language of poetry (though it is a significant part of the appeal for me). I’m talking of a language I know experientially (that has much in common with poetry), its subjugations, codes and allusions. A language I had to speak for a good portion of my life also. This is how we survived. Reading the handful of translations available of Gi’s work, the final lines of Whitman’s “Among The Multitude” are never far from my mind:

“I meant that you should discover me by so faint indirections,
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in
you.”

During my recent visit to Korea I came across a number of young people (with no interest in poetry) who, whenever I mentioned Gi, knew of and loved his work. What do you think it is about Gi’s work that might have particular resonance for a younger generation?

Well, I can only speak of the generation who were young in the 1990s. I don’t really know how Gi is being received by young people right now. First of all, it is important to remember that the poetry Gi published while alive did not draw the same level of public interest that it did after his death. His collected poems came out in 1989, just a few months after his demise. He passed away with his blue notebook of poems in his bag beside him. Several of his colleagues collected and arranged them as best as they could and published them using the arbitrary title Black Leaf in My Mouth, although it seems Gi was intending to call it Warning at the Station, which is far less ominous in tone.

So from the beginning, his book was known as the despairing work of a dead poet who died tragically in a theatre. As I said before, Korean critics don’t discuss the love themes, they just hash and re-hash the political elements and pore over technical/literary aspects. There are less than one hundred poems and with so many Korean poets entering the literary scene each year, interest soon ran out and Gi scholarship dwindled. But his popularity with college students remains steady. Ironically, in the 1990s, young aspiring poets would purposely hang out in Seoul theatres at night, hoping to absorb inspiration to write like their idol, unaware of the meaning of “theatre” as understood by the gay community.

But back to your question. There are other reasons for Gi’s appeal besides the posthumous hype (although the hype explains much of the fervour): his lively metaphors and maxims, his sensitivity, vulnerability, his femininity, which stands, refreshingly, against the norm of what feminist critic Gweon In-suk has called “military masculinity” regulating male expression since the 1960s. The greatest Gi aficionados are females of the “three-eight-six” generation.

One aspect that bears mentioning is that most poetry of the 1980s, offered up in praise of the Singular Nation and the Singular People, lost sight of the realities of society’s weak and disenfranchised – that is, those fringe existences that unadulterated nationalism fails to recognize: the handicapped, those of mixed blood, homosexuals, the unemployed, non-politicos and so on. Gi wrote about these people. Many college kids in the 1990s, I think, related to Gi’s refusal to identify with the structure, his standing outside it, to that timid intellectual hiding in the poplars. In the 1980s, such a posture would have been shameful. Gi was, in a word, ahead of his time.

TJ: So beyond Gi’s sexuality, which remains invisible to most or is conjectured and kept in its place, why his popularity? What is the work’s appeal?

He had a talent for creating a sense of alienation that many could relate to but not easily express themselves. I’ve just submitted a poem by another Korean poet, Choe Seung-ja, to an anthology of LGBT poems coming out this year called “Collective Brightness”, in which your friend Cyril Wong’s work is also represented. Choe is the other big individualist poet of the 1980s, and she also wrote same-sex poems. In harmony with Gi, the final line from that particular poem reads: “That I am alive is nothing but an eternal rumour.” It’s not surprising that those treating same-sex themes constitute the most pessimistic and adamantly individualistic poetic voices of the 1980s, because as homosexuals, they experienced double, or multiple oppressions. The editor at Blackbloom said Choe’s poetry stood out from other international same-sex poets in the anthology in terms of her sheer self-hatred and negativity. I think Gi’s will, too.

TJ: You are the founder and torchbearer of the ‘Korea Gay Literature’ Project. Can you tell me a little about the history and aims of the project and your current involvement with it?

The dream of the project is to become extinct as quickly as possible. The project is a transitional one involving transferring the problems and methodologies of gender and queer studies to Korean literary scholarship. Once Korean intellectuals begin to embrace the idea of same-sex literature, the goal of the project will be met.

Some limited progress is already apparent in my university’s literature department. The students now see, I think, why clinging to notions of medicalized homosexuality is harmful to minorities. The existence of sexual minorities probably had never occurred to most of them before. Probably a shock or unwanted information at first, but then, after acclimating themselves to the idea, they really do get it. That’s the tremendous power of suggestion.

I’d like to wait until the project has achieved all of its goals before I think back on my experiences getting it off the ground, but I can talk about what’s going on right now. Firstly, I’m trying to get Gi’s work and the work of other same-sex writers translated into English and other languages. A few people living in Europe and the U.S. have expressed interest in translating Gi’s work, and that is very encouraging.

Secondly, I aim to complete my dissertation on same-sex literature, criticism, and media discourses in Korea from the 1950s to the present. The project is just one small element among many developments taking place in Korea today in diverse realms such as film, drama, fashion, and various popular media. I predict that real, positive changes will begin to take place in Korean academe for LGBTs within five to ten years. That is my hope.

Gabriel Sylvian founded the Korean Gay Literature Project in 2004 with support from the Korean-American Educational Commission. The project has also received support from the Korean Literature Translation Institute (KLTI) and International Communication Foundation (ICF).