Tender Voyeur

Tender Voyeur, Donald Platt's ninth collection, tells the story of the author's coming out as bisexual, as related through meditations on the work of John Singer Sargent, whom several scholars now think may well have been gay, though closeted. A major ekphrastic project, Tender Voyeur features twenty-six high-quality reproductions of Sargent's paintings and drawings, interlaced with poems that interrogate the place of same-sex love at the turn of the 20th century and explore conflicting sexual desires in the different worlds of Sargent and of the author. An essay by historian and curator Trevor Fairbrother accompanies the work, discussing the political, financial, and puritanical obstacles that have hampered open discussion of Sargent's sexuality. An interview between Platt and Fairbrother, whose groundbreaking study of homoeroticism in Sargent's oeuvre inspired Tender Voyeur, acts as a coda, providing additional insight into the work and the collaboration that brought it forward.