Bay Windows - January 1, 2004
Laura Kiritsy, lkiritsy@baywindows.com.

As fate would have it, Sasha Alyson was looking to start a local gay newspaper and offered Kikel, a Harvard Ph.D. who was carving out a career as a freelance writer for the gay press - when he wasn't at the gym, hanging in the bars or overindulging in martinis - the chance to be involved in his project. Encouraged to stick around by his friend, author and activist Eric Rofes, Kikel took Alyson up on his offer. It's a good thing he did: Kikel was the person responsible for naming the publication that hit the streets of Boston in March 1983: Bay Windows - a tribute to a staple of Boston architecture and an emblem of the concept that the paper would provide a window into the city's gay and lesbian community.

In hindsight, Kikel cites another fortunate outcome of his decision. He speculates that had he moved to New York, "I would have been a victim of AIDS. I think I would have just gone right to the sex places that were still functioning there."

Instead Kikel, now 61, threw himself into Bay Windows, first as its poetry editor. He took the post of arts editor in 1984, a job that expanded over the years into the full-time position of Arts, Entertainment and Lifestyles Editor in 1992. Earlier this year, Kikel stepped down from the post; but having assumed his new role of contributing editor, he's not ready to end his long tenure with New England's leading GLBT weekly just yet.

But Kikel's career encompasses much more than his writing and editing for Bay Windows. He is a Grolier Award-winning poet who has published four volumes of his work, in addition to appearing in literary journals and anthologies such as "The Bad Boy Book of Erotic Poetry" and "Eros in Boystown: Contemporary Gay Poems About Sex." Long a promoter of new poets, Kikel has also edited anthologies of his own, including "Gents, Bad Boys & Barbarians: New Gay Male Poetry" His latest anthology, a sequel to "Gents" is due to hit the shelves in March 2004.

The wry, self-deprecating wit typical of Kikel's verse - and his conversation - led Publisher's Weekly to describe his work as being "in the tradition of Oscar Wilde, stylish, elegant and clever."

It's a comparison that, when raised, makes the unfailingly modest Kikel's face go crimson. With some prodding, he admits, "I was so happy. That was the Publisher's Weekly review of my first book ["Lasting Relations"]. It was a great review, really great. And it said I was in the Wilde tradition ... that felt great."

As a writer and out gay man in the post-Stonewall 1970s and a staffer at a gay newspaper at the height of the AIDS crisis, Kikel has lived through the best and worst of times in the gay rights movement. But he admits that he's always been more attuned to the arts than the front-page headlines. If you're talking about the news, he says, then "you're talking about the real world and I always say I don't have much traffic with it. I kind of thought the arts, that's the thing that would change hearts and minds."

His friend Michael Bronski, who has chronicled gay culture in his books and essays, says Kikel's political contributions have come through his art. The two met in the early 1970s through mutual friends when Bronski, an activist in the burgeoning Gay Liberation movement, was writing for the radical newspaper Fag Rag. Though Kikel didn't take to the streets like Bronski, he broke ground with the growing body of literary criticism he was publishing in gay publications at the time.

"I think that Rudy may claim not to have been political or not to have been interested in that," says Bronski. But from the early 1970s on, he asserts, "while other people who saw themselves as artists were adamant in always distancing themselves from any political movement, Rudy saw his art as part of - I don't know whether he'd use this word - part of an enormous upsurge ... of gay male literature."

Kikel's early writings for Fag Rag and the influential San Francisco publication Gay Sunshine, says Bronski, were an attempt to chart the emerging post-Stonewall body of gay literature. "So I would say while Rudy never went on protest marches, he certainly had a political sensibility on how he looked at the world and how he looked at art."

His political neutrality caught up with him at least once. The critic George Klawitter criticized Kikel's second book, "Long Division," published in 1993, for including just one reference to AIDS - and that on page 69 of a 70-page book. "Is this responsible writing?" Klawitter asked.

Kikel took the criticism to heart. And like so much of his work, he made the subject of AIDS deeply personal, chronicling the death of his ex-lover Craig Rowland in a series of poems published in 1997's "Period Pieces."

"That's the only way I could write about AIDS, was personally and directly," says Kikel. "Somebody who's death I was there for, stayed up all night waiting for."

The experience changed both his life and his work. "It was a tremendous thing," Kikel recalls of his experience with Rowland. The couple ended their two-year relationship badly in the mid-70s, and Rowland moved away. He returned to Boston in 1990 to spend what would be the last year of his life, and the two were able to heal the wounds they'd inflicted on each other. "We were really able to sort of love one another again," Kikel recalls. "We were finally able to sort of hack through that stuff, I think, preparing ourselves for something better. In his case it was death, but that was a relief for him at the time."

Kikel has laid bare much of his life in his poetry, including his battle with alcoholism and his steps into sobriety. He credits having a partner of 17 years, Sterling Giles, a home and job to his 22 years of sobriety.

What hasn't yet made it to the page is the fact that Kikel was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease three years ago. "That would be next," says Kikel. "Everything up to now has been about staying alive, staying young, vigorous. That, as we all know, gets taken away bit by bit." He is currently taking medication to slow the progression of the disease.

As a result of his condition, Kikel says he welcomes the reduced workload at Bay Windows. But that doesn't mean he's not keeping busy - he's currently preparing a manuscript he completed earlier this year for publication.

"I actually I am quite proud of the fact that I now did what I wanted to do, which is to write a poem that's book length - a book length poem of 81 sections," he says. The poem, says Kikel, is a conversation between himself and his "two other selves," reflecting on the events of his life.

"This is almost like looking at a past world," he says, flipping through the manuscript. "But you know, it's alive in my mind."

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