Meet Beachcomber Mike
The guy on the left is me—Michael Broder—now. The guy on the right is me in 1990 at the age of 29. In that photo, taken by my late friend Chet Elkind, I am sitting on a rock jetty in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where from 1989 to 1992 I lived in a studio apartment overlooking the boardwalk, the beach, and the ocean. Beachcomber Mike is a construct—a cypher for my journey to reconnect with my own essential spirit of creativity and adventure, which in my imagination is associated most powerfully with those years in Brighton Beach. While the newsletter Beachcomber Mike is a space for me to share some 40 years of literary archive, it is also a kind of ever-evolving record of that journey.
For now, Beachcomber Mike features my poetry, in particular because that is what the vast majority of my subscribers know me for and want to read. The poetry I have published in journals and books is only the caramelized shell of a deep dish pastry that longs to be savored by poetry gourmands everywhere. To keep things interesting, I create a variety of posts that feature different aspects of my archive—poems that were published in journals since 2000; poems buried in 30 year old notebooks; poems I wrote yesterday; and so on.
My poetry collection This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. In addition to a BA in comparative literature from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University, I hold a PhD in classics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
My dissertation was about queer kinship and camp aesthetics in a poem by the Roman satirist Juvenal. In particular, it was about how the queer/camp content of that poem was non grata to literary scholars of the past 200 years, leading it (along with two other naughty satires of Juvenal) to be expurgated from editions of Juvenal’s work, presented in bowdlerized English translations, and/or written about in ways that struggled mightily to explain away the evident glee that Juvenal took in his John Waters-level representation of the sexual relationship between an effeminate patron and his massively endowed hustler client. I make quite the haystack of this matter, as part of a larger argument about the modern heteropatriarchal suppression of transgressive queer content from classical antiquity.
Over time, I am going to find ways to share my scholarly writing here on Substack, along with my fiction, memoir, and essay writing, be they cordoned into different subsections of Beachcomber Mike, or in altogether distinct Substack publications.
So if you came for the poetry, fear not—Beachcomber Mike will remain a safe and welcoming space for you. And if fiction, memoir, essays, and really kick-ass Smash the Church, Smash the State-level cultural materialist academic shit is your jam—well, subscribe, drop me a line about your interests, and let’s grow this Substack to new heights on the ASAP.
Why subscribe?
Content on Substack can be free, paid, or a combination of the two. Beachcomber Mike is currently all free all the time, so anyone can come to this website and read all the content. Be that as it may, if you do sign up for a paid subscription, you'll support my work and help make it possible for me to live the Beachcomber Mike life—which means reading, writing, and taking long walks on the beach.
Subscribers—paid or free—get each new post in your email inbox. Or, if you prefer, you can just get a notification on your phone each time a new post drops.
