Thom Gunn (1929–2004), British-born poet, immigrated to the United States in 1954 and taught at Stanford and UC Berkeley while publishing collections including Fighting Terms (1954), My Sad Captains (1961), Moly (1971), and The Man with Night Sweats (1992), an elegy for friends lost to AIDS. His 1995 Collected Poems won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Poetry, and the Publishing Triangle later renamed its poetry prize the Thom Gunn Award in his honor. Jack Fritscher, a friend since 1969, wrote “‘Leather Poet Laureate’ of Folsom Street,” collected in Profiles in Gay Courage: Leatherfolk, Arts, and Ideas (2022); Gunn is honored with a boot print on Ringold Alley’s Leather Memoir in San Francisco’s Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District.

Profiles in Gay Courage
Thom Gunn