I was never formally introduced to Andrea Gibson’s poetry. They just felt like kin from the beginning, like a queer cousin I always knew.
Gibson — a queer poet, activist and performance artist who explored identity, mental health, politics and their battle with terminal cancer — died Monday at age 49. When I listened to them read, it felt so much like listening to myself that when they uttered some tiny, intimate truth that might seem too private to be voiced, I would gasp at the familiarity of their words.
Me too, gender ambivalence. Me too, sapphic obsession. Me too, love-hating the body that holds me. Me too, scream-crying at the history of human cruelty. Me too, loving the world too much.
I have heard Gibson called a “poet’s poet,” but in a less obvious way. In all my exorbitant years of schooling, Andrea Gibson never appeared on a reading list. Academics don’t generally know what to do with spoken-word poetry, and once you add in Gibson’s queerness and confessionality, they basically embodied everything academic poetry condescends to and abhors — despite their virtuosity.
I didn’t even know Gibson was truly famous until their death. Since I didn’t learn about them in school, my relationship with their work felt intimate and singular. It turns out everyone felt that way. I think that’s what it actually means to be a poet’s poet — everyone everywhere gasping, “Me too,” like widows meeting our sister wives.
Andrea Gibson was the poet laureate of tender queers, romantic punks and love activists (also the state of Colorado). They made the suicide statistics of queer teens into poetry. In the wrong hands, that would have been trauma porn at best. In Gibson’s hands, it was hope. They memorialized tragedy without being trite — and, perhaps more urgently, without guile. They did important work without any trace of self-importance. And how many poets can you really say that about? We aren’t exactly known for our humility.
And they did it all walking that ephemeral line between making it look easy and never pretending it wasn’t hard. Despite the fact that Gibson isn’t a canonical poet (yet), I learned more about performance from them than from any professor. Their casual gravitas brought rooms to tears, but they were never cool about it. “Ode to the Public Panic Attack” lays bare the reality of feeling like your body is your own stalker. It’s a master class in how to connect with an audience over the roar of your own fear — how to survive the spotlight in a queer body that doesn’t behave.
Yes, Gibson lived loudly, but they also spoke candidly about moments when they wanted to give up. Their poem “Living Proof,” about the night they went to a bridge and found another man ready to jump, is salve for dark moments — a reminder that somewhere there is a canyon of lilacs where you can scream for connection and hear other voices echoed back to you. I can only imagine how many of the lives of my sister wives those echoes have saved. When someone comes to me fragile, crying that they feel too much, I will say “So did God,” citing Gibson.
Gibson was celebrated for their activism, in and out of their writing and performance. They mourned every injustice in verse with fairness and force. And always with gentleness. That was the pulse beating behind everything they wrote. Yes, it fought. Yes, it rallied. But it also wept. Gibson was an activist for tenderness, a warrior fighting for the human heart. “Just to be clear,” they wrote, “I don’t want to get out without a broken heart. I intend to leave this life so shattered there’s gonna have to be a thousand separate heavens for all of my flying parts.”
And that, I think, is their legacy. Gibson’s poetry mined the minutiae of queer life, the terror of American politics and all the oppression and suffering in the world and, against all odds, found hope. They paved a path for being poetic and engaged, and now we, all of us, have to walk it with their grace as a guide. They showed me that being confessional and heartsick and unapologetically queer aren’t obstacles to activism or to art — they are the path.
I will never walk that path they paved with their dexterity and fortitude, but I am grateful to have them as a guide.