Wearing a deep brown jacket, black turtle-neck and dark, imperfect beard, David Bergman stands in a Towson coffee bar reading his poetry aloud.
Despite the gurgle and whoosh of espresso machines, his slow, deep voice draws near even those who might pass by. Already about 50 people have gathered on this wintry December evening to listen to the Towson State University professor. And, one by one, the crowd is growing.
Suddenly -- between stanzas -- Dr. Bergman interrupts himself. He draws his glasses off his nose and uses them to gesture at the crowd: "Excuse me," he says. "I see a couple of my students out there. I'd like to point out that this is an example of a sonnet."
A ripple of chuckles indicates he has reached his audience, which these days extends far beyond the small gathering in Towson. Producing books at a pace colleagues variously refer to as "amazing" and "mind-boggling," David Bergman has made himself a star in the gay literary world.
In 1991, he published what's considered a seminal work on gay writing called "Gaeity Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature." It was followed by a fiction-writing style book, a steady flow of academic articles and journalistic essays, and several publications edited by the professor, including two anthologies of literary essays.
This year, the 44-year-old Charles Village resident may have surpassed himself.
Since last spring, four new books edited by Dr. Bergman have been published -- a collection of contemporary gay male fiction, an anthology of the renowned gay writer Edmund White's essays and two collections dealing with the history of gay literature. He also just released his second book of poetry, "The Care and Treatment of Pain," an exploration of the grief inflicted by AIDS.
Timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, a 1969 uprising that took place in a Greenwich Village bar and considered the start of the gay rights movement, the books are part of a flurry of gay publications.
And the recent crop of publications with Dr. Bergman's name on them has thrust the professor, already respected in academic circles for literary criticism and research and in poetry circles for verse, into the limelight of the gay community nationally.
"Bergman's work is an answer to a great hunger in the gay and lesbian community. He clarifies things for us and from that we get knowledge about how to move through our lives and then move forward," says David Drake, an Obie Award-winning playwright who used to live in Baltimore. "It's work like his that shapes our community."
A dark-haired hobbit of a man with a love for playing the piano, Dr. Bergman and his older brother grew up in Queens, N.Y., where his mother was a teacher and his father was an art director for an advertising firm.
He claims his childhood was "very ordinary." But at age 3 1/2 , the young Bergman flipped off a swing and hit his head hard enough to cause a blood clot, which made him lose control of his right side for two years.
Bedridden and unable to play with other boys his age, he lived in a rich fantasy world where his friends were talking elephants and hot-air balloon rides were free for the taking. During this time, he says, he turned inward and, fascinated by the meaning and sounds and power of words, began writing verse.
A strong desire to write
"As long as I can remember I wanted to be a writer," he says. "I both loved and feared books -- I thought they had enormously magical power."
Gradually, Dr. Bergman regained greater control of the nerves on his right side. Still, he says, "my sense of balance and coordination has never been up to par: I'm rather klutzy."
By the time he entered Kenyon College in Ohio as an English major, he was serious about poetry. And it was at Kenyon that Dr. Bergman met Baltimore poet and writer Daniel Mark Epstein.
Mr. Epstein was a college junior, already recognized campus-wide for his poetry. As an awe-struck freshman, Dr. Bergman would slide his work under Mr. Epstein's dormitory room door, in hopes that it would be read. Their friendship has lasted nearly 30 years. And Mr. Epstein, who preceded Dr. Bergman as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, played a role in drawing Dr. Bergman -- who also earned his doctorate in English there -- to Baltimore.
The two men still share notes on new poets whose work they enjoy and have co-authored books about literature and poetry. More importantly, they share their own work, each listening to and critiquing the other's.
"David has a huge range of talents but his greatest gifts are as a poet," says Mr. Epstein. "He is generous and courageous, and has been a good friend to me for 30 years because of his honesty. He contains 'multitudes' of gifts, as Whitman would say."
20 years at TSU
It was in 1974, while finishing his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, that Dr. Bergman began teaching at Towson State University -- and it is there that he has remained and flourished.
On campus, where he teaches literature and poetry, as well as an occasional course in gay fiction, he is known among students as an approachable teacher and an eloquent reader of verse. He also serves as a faculty adviser for a student group known as the Diverse Sexual Orientation Collective.
But his presence as an openly homosexual professor on the Towson campus has not been without controversy.
In the spring of 1992, a young woman was assaulted for defending Dr. Bergman in a widely publicized incident that made gay rights the focus of debate throughout campus.
The woman, who was taking Dr. Bergman's British Literature class, was talking with a friend in the student union. A man, who was never caught, interrupted the conversation by calling Dr. Bergman a "fag" and announcing that because Dr. Bergman is gay, he didn't deserve to teach.
When the woman stood up for Dr. Bergman, the man punched her in the face.
The incident became a campus-wide furor with the woman's Christian sorority taking a stand against Dr. Bergman -- and the gay and lesbian student group holding a rally on behalf of gay rights.
In the end, the university provided funds to bring gay and lesbian speakers to campus, and the administration agreed to add sexual orientation to its public declaration of characteristics disallowed from consideration by the university while hiring staff and faculty.
The effects of homophobia
"It was an odd incident for me because it was about me, but I wasn't there when it happened," says Dr. Bergman. "But I think the incident made very clear that homophobia affects not only gays and lesbians, it affects everyone. It affects the nature of the lives we lead: Unless we can feel comfortable with our own sexuality we cannot lead happy lives."
That is the credo by which Dr. Bergman now lives, but there was a time when he wasn't comfortable with his own sexuality -- and a time when he did not write.
As a sophomore in college, Dr. Bergman struggled to come to terms with his homosexuality and became extremely depressed, says. And bit by bit, his desire to create dried up.
Though he didn't realize it then, his sexuality is an integral part of his voice as a writer and when he repressed or rejected that sexuality, he could not write, he says.
"Figuring out who I was [sexually] was very much a part of that depression and now, having figured it out, it is the solution, I think, to why I'm never particularly blocked anymore," he says.
His ability to write returned in the spring of his first year as a Hopkins graduate student, a few months after he met his first lover at a showing of John Waters' "Pink Flamingos."
The professor remembers the precise moment inspiration came back: "It was quite a wonderful time. We were returning from Harpers Ferry in a beige VW beetle, a really tiny, little car and I pulled some paper out of the glove compartment and started writing about Walt Whitman and being gay. And it was very liberating."
He hasn't stopped writing since.
Looking back, looking ahead
In his work now, Dr. Bergman looks to the past and to the future.
One of the books that he edited is called, "The Violet Quill, the Emergence of Gay Writing After Stonewall." Published this year, it is a collection of letters, essays and stories by seven artists including Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Christopher Cox, Felice Picano and George Whitmore. Part of a loosely knit coalition of gay writers, the men gathered in the early 1980s to eat desserts and to read their works-in-progress.
"Not much to mythologize," writes Dr. Bergman in the introduction. Except, he adds, these writers, with the addition of Larry Kramer and Paul Monette, "became the most important gay authors of the decade, setting the standard for gay fiction against which the present boom in gay writing is always compared."
But another book edited by Dr. Bergman points ahead, not behind. Titled "Men on Men 5," and published this year, it is the fifth book in a series of collections of contemporary gay male fiction.
For gay authors, being published in this series can be compared to being published in Esquire for mainstream writers. Dr. Bergman will also edit the next collection, "Men On Men 6," due out in 1996.
'A major player'
"David Bergman is a major player right now in the world of gay male fiction," says Jim Marks, editor of the Lambda Rising Book Report, the New York Times Book Review of the gay world.
" 'Men on Men 5' and 'Men on Men 6,' are very, very important collections -- not only do they have the best gay male fiction going on right now, but being published in that series opens the door to being published in other larger markets."
Though the bulk of Dr. Bergman's work is focused on gay literature, he also has written on American literature and poetry -- topics more widely accepted in traditional academic circles.
It is this versatility, some colleagues say, that lends Dr. Bergman's innovative work greater credence among academicians who would look askance at gay studies.
"He has a very broad and generous view of what education is and why his work is very important," says Dr. Michael Marcuse, associate professor of English at the University of Maryland College Park.
"But it is his training that has made all this possible: He is P PTC graduate, after all, from the oldest graduate school in the country. He was very well-trained in the [traditional] study of literature."
Indeed Dr. Bergman hopes his work will be viewed in broad terms. "I think what I do stands up to what anyone else in more recognized fields would be doing," he says. "There are things to be learned by looking at gay literature alone, but I think there are things to be learned by looking at it as a part of a larger whole."
'Death and the Young Man'
Death, you needn't be afraid,
thin and fevered though I am.
I, who have waited so long
to see you, will not struggle
now that you've arrived. Just
be
gentle. This is my first time."
"Yes, I was frightened. Though
I
have taken many ravaged
by Time and Cruelty, yet
not until now, one like you
so beautiful and ready.
Let me hold you in my arms."
"The Care and Treatment of Pain"
David Bergman