“Wilde Boys is a queer poetry salon for beautiful boys who write and appreciate beautiful poems”, as its creator Alex Dimitrov puts it. The salon brings together established and emerging queer poets in New York City.
Organized and run by Dimitrov, a 2009 Sarah Lawrence graduate who now works at the Academy of American Poets, the salon meets monthly in Manhattan and Brooklyn at the apartments of various salon members, and frequently at poet Tom Healy’s West Village apartment. The first meeting was held there this past May and began with a reading and discussion of the poems of James Merrill.
“I wanted to create a smart and sexy gathering of queer poets where aesthetic, formal, and political issues pertaining to contemporary poetry could be discussed without pretension,” says Dimitrov. “I was, of course, inspired by the original French salons of the 17th and 18th century, and I also wanted to adopt Oscar Wilde as our patron saint.”
