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Slide 1

As the son of an army engineer, Mark Doty grew up in a succession of suburbs in Tennessee,
Florida, southern California, and Arizona. He has described himself as having been a sissy;
frightened by his emerging sexual identity, he married hastily at age eighteen. After completing
his undergraduate studies at Drake University in Iowa, he got a divorce and moved to
Manhattan, where he paid his dues as a temporary office worker. He earned a masters degree in
creative writing from Goddard College during part-time semesters;
Slide 2
he met his first great love, Wally Roberts. The couple lived together for twelve years in
Manhattan and Provincetown. Wallys illness and death from AIDS in 1994 was the central
event in Dotys young life as both a person and poet. In the interim, however, Doty was
publishing his early work. Dotys next volume, Atlantis (1995) was a response to, and in many
respects a description of, Wallys illness and death. The poet and memoirist Patricia Hampl
called the book simply miraculous. Hampl loved Dotys casual voice and his ability to make
something universalan emblem that springs open for us allout of an individual tragedy.
She compared Doty to Keats in being poised on exact perception. When he sees the oceanthe
salt spray hits you. The Yale Review critic Willard Spiegelman applauded both the works visual
quality and its smooth, graceful music. However, after Wallys death, Doty found himself
unable to write or even read.
Slide 3
On its publication in 1987, Booklist praised the quiet, intimate Turtle, Swan for turning the
gay experience into an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend
suffering. Marianne Boruch, in American Poetry Review, called the volume a stunning
arrival. Dotys second collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991), also won praise from
critics. Miriam Levine, in American Book Review, appreciated Dotys gift for simple speech,
arguing that Dotys poems work best when he finds his way back and forth between the
vernacular and the elegant music of desire and loss. Poetry reviewerDavid Baker commended
Doty for well-ordered poetry whose primary method is anecdotal, whose speaker is singular
and personal, and whose vision is skeptical. If there was a problem in Dotys work, Baker
hypothesized, it was the poets detachment from his own storyDoty, he claimed, approached
his subjects as a privileged observer and
Charlie Howard
harles O. Howard (January 31, 1961 July 7, 1984) was an American murder victim in Bangor,
Maine in 1984. As Howard and a male companion, Roy Ogden, were walking down the street, three
teenagers, Shawn I. Mabry, age 16, James Francis Baines, age 15, and Daniel Ness, age 17,
harassed Howard for being gay. The youths chased the pair, yelling homophobic epithets, until they
caught Howard and threw him over the State Street Bridge into the Kenduskeag Stream, despite his
pleas that he could not swim. He drowned, but his friend escaped and pulled a fire alarm. Charlie
Howard's body was found by rescue workers several hours later. his incident inspired[citation needed] a
similar scene in the beginning of Stephen King's novel It, where three homophobic teenagers throw
an openly gay man, Adrian Mellon, over a bridge and into the Kenduskeag, there to be set upon and
murdered by the monster Pennywise. Mark Doty wrote a poem about the tragedy called "Charlie
Howard's Descent".[2] The murder is also the inspiration for a novel by Bette Greene titled The
Drowning of Stephan JonesCharlie Howard. From new Hampshire

In 1984, many were not tolerant of homosexuals and victims of gay bashing often did not report
incidents.[3] Charlie was often tormented by local high school boys and was asked to leave a local
night club when he danced with a man.[3] Charlie was accosted by a woman in a local market one
day shouting epithets such as "You pervert" and "You queer!" Frightened, Charlie made a hasty
retreat, but as he was leaving, stopped, turned around, and blew a kiss. [3] After this, Charlie was
more wary of strangers. Leaving his apartment one day, he found his pet kitten dead on the
doorstep. It had been strangled.[3]

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