"Part reading journal, part literary criticism, The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara explores the works of heavyweights like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gore Vidal, as well as writers like Fitz-Greene Halleck, Glenway Wescott, Jane Bowles, David Wojnarowicz, and Henri Cole, among others." "In Whitaker's commentary, he shows how powerfully gay literature has been impacted by societal mores. The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara begins with the nineteenth century, before there were many openly gay American writers; continues with what Whitaker calls the "gay century," the period when he suggests the gay sensibility flourished; and closes with the twenty-first, in which he notes that a gay sensibility survives despite the mainstreaming of gay culture."--Jacket.