In Touch (May/June 1979), Part Two

The son of Clarence Crane, the successful Ohio candy maker who invented the lifesaver, Hart Crane attained minor fame as an avant-garde writer, with his admiration and resentment for fellow poet T.S. Eliot prompting the creation of his most famous work: The Bridge (1930). Despite his publications in small magazines, Hart spent much of his time either temporarily employed as a copywriter or jobless and under the financial support of his father. In 1932, at the age of thirty-two, the writer’s longstanding bouts with depression led to his suicide. Although Hart had a minor same-sex relationship with an older man during his adolescence, modern literary critics have begun to read the vague imagery of his poetry as a surreptitious confession of his homosexual desires. Such an interpretation, in turn, can be found in the May/June issue of In Touch (which has been broken into two parts), where William Russo’s article makes the claim that Crane was one of contemporary society’s earliest gay poets. Also included in the second half of this issue (see the first half here) is a showcase of the Mr. In Touch Portland competition, a spread of model John Dillon, a praise of actor Ryan O’Neal, a readers’ survey, and Ian Whitcomb’s “Lost Boys” (about the sexual antics of an English boys’ school).