Jeffery Beam, son of the South

LOVE COMES

not silent,
but noisy and indiscreet,
rowdy and persistent.
He comes in leaf fall.
musty earth in his palms.
Held out to me
I can do nothing but take it,
and take it gladly,
earth being the one coolness
other than water
to be enjoyed.

Jeffery Beam never wanted to be “a gay poet.”

He didn’t want to be an unpublished poet either.

But good poetry by a gay man could be a hard sell in the '80s and '90s if you weren't part of the in crowd -- as in “in” New York and other cities where many of Beam’s contemporaries were finding success.

Now Beam, has taken many of his “fugitive” poems, many published in gay journals but not previously in book form and published them in “The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969-2007.” He gave a reading last week at The Internationalist book store.

Beam didn’t want to leave his native South to make it as a poet. More to the point, he saw value in living as gay man where that might not be easy.

“I saw it as a political act,” he said.

“I thought some of us needed to stay here.”

Now, 38 years after he wrote the oldest poem in “Tendons,” Beam sees a benefit to being excluded from the anthologies. By not fitting in with the urban gay poets who were defining a certain type of gay culture, he says he avoided confining his themes of coming out and political messages that today seem dated.

His work was always more about the spiritual, rather than political journey.

Even if that journey only took him from Kannapolis to Chapel Hill ... and now to Hillsborough, where he lives with his partner of 28 years, Stanley.

“I grew up redneck,” Beam told D.G. Martin on WCHL a few weeks ago. “That didn’t mean I could stay in Kannapolis. But I still wanted to stay in the South to demonstrate what was like to be in front of you, to demonstrate a life.”

“I want to live my life in the same wonderful kind of community I grew up in. I find people in the South are such a delight to be with. And I’m one of them.”