San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
San Francisco poet channels queer grief in new collection
Seventeen years ago, James J. Siegel landed in San Francisco.
On a business trip from his hometown of Toledo, Ohio, the poet went immediately to where all poets go when their feet first feel San Francisco beneath them: the house that Lawrence Ferlinghetti built.
In February, Ferlinghetti died at the age of 101. Speaking with The Chronicle a day after news of the poet’s death broke, Siegel, 43, reflected on what it meant to him when he first stood in the legendary poetry room of City Lights Bookstore, which Ferlinghetti cofounded in 1953.
“If you are a poet,” Siegel said, “it’s just one of those meccas that you go to and seek out. Even if you weren’t into the Beats, you go into that poetry room, and it’s like every kind of poetry rubbing elbows with each other. I just love the fact that it will always sustain and be there for future generations of artists to come. As long as that’s still there, it kind of gives me hope for San Francisco.”
The essence of Siegel’s thoughts on Ferlinghetti and City Lights is captured in his new poetry collection, “The God of San Francisco.” Published in November by Sibling Rivalry Press, Siegel’s poems examine queer grief both past and present with a decidedly local focus.
Whether surveying the fall of the Castro Funeral Home, reveling in the mayhem of a Hunky Jesus contest or contrasting the words of God with the suffering of the AIDS crisis, Siegel’s poems are filled with small details, raw empathy and a love for San Francisco that seems as unflappable as the arrival of the fog.
There are also a lot of ghosts: ghosts of people, yes, but of buildings and feelings, too.
According to Siegel, the subject has long haunted his thoughts.
“My first collection was very much based on ghost lore and Ohio — literal and metaphorical ghosts,” he said. “That’s just something that’s always in my head. I’m also very interested in places. I just love going somewhere and sensing the ghosts and the memories that are still left behind.”
As the collection’s titular poem would suggest, another major theme in “The God of San Francisco” is religion.
In poems like “Jesus Descends on Golden Gate Park” and “Twelve Noon Bells,” Siegel details how AIDS victims were abandoned by their religion in a time of need while also celebrating the everyday saints that walk among us.
“I grew up Catholic, and that’s a hard thing to shake,” Siegel said. “I also grew up with a Christianity that I don’t think really exists anymore. I grew up with a very beatitude kind of Jesus: do onto others, blessed are the meek — all of that stuff. And yet, as Christian people, we turned our backs on the gay and queer community.”
But in San Francisco, Siegel found people who were offering such help, care and compassion.
“What I’ve since learned,” he said, “is that there are people in the gay community who I think have been more Christlike than anyone I’ve ever seen in the straight world. To me, that means going to Twin Peaks and seeing people who survived an epidemic — not only survived it, but who took care of each other when other people wouldn’t. That, to me, is godliness, in a sense.”
That doesn’t mean “The God of San Francisco” is an unabashed love letter to the city, however. In “They Still Say Faggot in San Francisco,” for instance, Siegel grapples with the shock one feels when arriving to a supposed utopia of safety only to learn that such places don’t truly exist.
“That really shattered things for me,” Siegel explained, “because when you get here, you think you’re going to find this little slice of heaven — this bubble — but it’s not like that. It’s just kind of everywhere you go.”
Five years ago, Siegel began hosting a monthly series called Literary Speakeasy at Martuni’s on Valencia Street. With live events on hold, the shows are being held online, with each one raising funds for a worthy cause. Past recipients have included 826 Valencia and the American Bookbinders Museum, though Siegel says the day they can go back to inperson readings cannot arrive soon enough.
Siegel conceded that publishing “The God of San Francisco” during a new, albeit very different, public health crisis, was “not ideal.”
That said, he also believes there is perhaps some solace to be found in the idea that, like the AIDS crisis, this COVID19 pandemic too shall pass.
“I think we would be crazy to forget that we’ve been through these things before and that we can get through them, and that things do get better.”