MPR’s Lorna Benson interviews gay poet Mark Doty about his book “Firebird: A Memoir.” Doty reads a selection from the book, recalling how the lyrics to Petula Clark's song "Downtown" gave him hope.

In his new memoir, Doty paints a childhood filled with confusion and pain and explains how he turned to art, movies and music to find himself.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) When you're alone and life is making you lonely you can always go downtown when you've got worries all the noise and the hurry seems to help I know downtown in only four lines. She's made it clear that she understands exactly how it feels to be alone and worried. Thus she is every teenage kids co-conspirator. I know she says she understands me at a distance, which is exactly how I long to be understood the Thule understands that Anonymous Comfort which is one of adolescence is great and only consolations hanging out wandering around getting lost in the world that's larger than your family. Especially when you come from a little nuclear not of trouble. It's hard to feel the space around yourself in which you can come to be unknown and you can't go on being known in the old ways. You need to disappear a little in order to come back. As someone new yourself you have to go downtown

(00:01:06) you took this advice when you were 14 years old you escape to an awfully big downtown you went to San Francisco.

(00:01:14) I ran away from home. It was the summer after the Summer of Love 1969 and I felt that I was going off to join another life. I was going to find a band of sensitive young people whose values were a little more like my own. Own as you can imagine it at 14. I didn't quite have the skills to survive in that world. So it was a short Escape but it was an important Adventure. Nonetheless

(00:01:41) your mother help Drive You

(00:01:42) My Mother drove me part of the way, so I could I could hitchhike the rest of the way to to join the flower children.

(00:01:51) What do you think of that now

(00:01:52) well in retrospect, That startles me that was one of the details which I had forgotten and in the act of writing the book of course many things came floating up to the surface and that was one that startled me because I realized that when your parents help you run away from home that comes a bit close to abandonment. Doesn't it?

(00:02:12) Why do you think she did

(00:02:13) it? Well, I think that my parents experienced a terrific conflict towards me that they love me as their son and yet they were also terrified of their son sexuality. It's a devastating thing to realize that your parents cannot accept the category in which they place you.

(00:02:40) Do. You think that your mother really wanted? You dead? Because you were gay. The reason that I ask this is because you had a violent encounter with

(00:02:50) her when I was a teenager my mother began to drink with increasing frequency her alcoholism. And became more and more the controlling force in her life at one point when I was about 16. She took my father's gun from a drawer held it at me and attempted to pull the trigger. She was too drunk to get the safety off that moment. My mother's rejection. My mother's most profound rejection of her son has of course stayed with me ever since and I hold it in memory against all those moments when my mother also offered me. Urchins acceptance and those memories are very rich ones glowing ones and yet they don't erase. Of course the memory of that destructive gesture to

(00:03:42) at the time. There was no discussion of it. I take it you find that very odd

(00:03:47) now absolutely there was no discussion of it at all. It's simply took place. My father came home took the gun away from her and put it away and it was never mentioned again, which was the way that struggle was often dealt with in my Wait in some ways. I wonder if that's one of the things that required me to become a writer since so much was unsaid. I have been very devoted as an adult to the practice of saying of trying to make things clear

(00:04:16) at your mother's funeral. You defended her to your father and your sister

(00:04:21) why? I felt deeply connected to my mother I think in part because she was such a magnetic and difficult person and often are when it's when love is charged by struggle. It has a greater. Hold on us. It has a deep kind of emotional power. So part of the work of this book was Sort out what I learned from my mother and certainly one of the things that you learn from someone who tries to shoot you is that you don't deserve to live but I also learned from her a great deal about those things which make living worthwhile.

(00:05:08) It seemed like you harbored more anger for your father and he was certainly no saint but he didn't try to shoot

(00:05:14) you. It's absolutely true that there was more more anger. They're less of a sense of resolution. I think in part that's because my father is Still alive and so that relationship is ongoing unlike my relationship with my mother which I've had time to sort out and she's been gone for 20 years. Now. I also think that my father as the person who was not alcoholic was in that sense the more responsible member of the household when who was until might have intervened and one of the Great difficulties for me in looking back at the past is to try to understand the circumstances which led my father not to intervene in my mother's illness not to make things better. That's what I wanted when I was young. I wanted my father to change things and I think it took me until the writing of this book to see some of the ways in which my father was also controlled by circumstance in which it wouldn't have been so easy for him to make things better.

(00:06:24) In the book you write why tell a story like this who would want to read

(00:06:29) it? I thought very much about this because there are elements of Firebird which are very painful ones. There are also comic elements. There are elements of camp and of a kind of I hope gentle laughter at the child that I was in the circumstances in which I found myself, but certainly it is a story about survival and story about surviving very difficult circumstances. I hope that readers coming to this book will not be so much. Much reading about my life and about what happened to me as about as they will be encountering their own lives their own experiences of struggle and in survival of those things those gifts that carry us through the difficult.