NOVEMBER 22 I woke up at Cataline O’Hara’s house. As I was

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NOVEMBER 22

I woke up at Cataline O’Hara’s house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (Maria wasn’t there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a jew of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, wereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.
Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Ovtavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Ruben Dario was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
“In our language, of course,” he clarified. “In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.”