The three bisexually oriented books I’ll recite from today are landmark achievements in world culture, and I’ve written books in “interview” style to con-verse with them.   

Virgil (70-19 BCE) wrote Eclogues, ten one-act verse plays about Roman country life. All his shepherd-farmers are startlingly cultured people, poets and musicians who speak often about music and whose main form of entertainment is to arrange contests in lyrical composition, singing, and reciting. I’ll read the Second Eclogue, which is a soliloquy of mainly homoerotic love lament. And I’ll read parts 1-3 of my “reply” lyric for context. [I translate Virgil from the 1853 German version by Christian Nathaniel Osiander.]  

Muhammad Shemseddin Hafiz (1315-1390) is a Persian pub poet from whose Divan  or Collection I translate using Joseph von Hammer’s 1815 German version. My book, called Poems of Wine and Tavern Romance, sums up Hafiz’ two main concerns. Tavern Romances in medieval Shiraz are chiefly homosexual. Poem 8 dramatizes Hafiz’ love for his boyfriend unforgettably in the first two lines. I’ll read my two-part “reply” in the interview about this poem,  Poem 16 is another lyric I’ll recite.  

In my book Shakespair I interview Shakespeare by replying to each of his 154 sonnets with a sonnet of my own in the same stanza pattern. On p. xiv I sum up the censorship problem he faced early on for his frequent homoerotic focus. In sonnets 1 and 4 with reply I sample talks Will has had with his boyfriend, and in reply 9 I offer a comment. Sonnet 20 focuses on the master-mistress theme, and I comment on this by reading part 4 of my reply to Virgil’s Second Eclogue.   

Let me thank Kristen Kemmerer and Emily Phelps, organizers who helped set up the October 23-24 2021 Annual SUNY Pride Conference at SUNY Oneonta where I presented my virtual contribution, which you are viewing and hearing.