Blanco was selected by the White House as the inaugural poet. | Courtesy Richard Blanco Obama poet's 'queer shame' pain

The poet tapped Wednesday to appear at President Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony has written frankly about the challenges and hostility he faced growing up as a gay man, recounting how his own grandmother thought of him as the “queer shame of the family” and called him a “faggot.”

Richard Blanco, the youngest Inaugural poet to date (he’s 44), is also the country’s first gay, as well as first Hispanic, poet to participate in the Inauguration ceremony, according to a release from the Presidential Inauguration Committee. His work tackles, among other subjects, “the intersection of his cultural identities as a Cuban-American gay man,” the committee said.


For example, in the essay “Afternoons as Endora,” which appeared in a 2009 collection called “My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them,” Blanco describes himself as a “boy who hated being a boy.” He preferred doodling in notebooks to playing sports, and found his mother’s Tupperware parties more appealing than Clint Eastwood movies, he wrote.

And Blanco faced severe backlash from his grandmother for those preferences.

“According to her, I was a no-good sissy — un mariconcito — the queer shame of the family,” Blanco wrote. “And she let me know it all the time: Why don’t we just sign you up for ballet lessons? Everyone thinks you’re a girl on the phone — can’t you talk like a man? I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who is a faggot like you.”

“Her constant attacks made me an extremely self-conscious and quiet child,” Blanco wrote of his grandmother. “But it also made me a keen observer of the world around me, because my interior world was far too painful. This inadvertently led me to become a writer, a recorder of images and details.”

That reflection comes as part of an essay that details afternoons in which Blanco, behind a locked door would dress up as Endora, a female character on the show “Bewitched.”

“I wanted to be as powerful as her, and for a little while every afternoon I was,” he wrote of the fictional witch character. “I could conjure up thunderstorms so I wouldn’t have to go to baseball practice…I could concoct love potions that would make me like girls instead of boys and make my grandmother love me.”

Blanco has published several collections of poetry, the Presidential Inaugural Committee noted . His first, “City of a Hundred Fires,” earned the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh. The second book, “Directions to The Beach of the Dead,” won the PEN American Center Beyond Margins Award, and another collection, “Looking for the Gulf Motel,” was published last year.

Blanco, a consultant by training, has also taught at Georgetown and American universities, and at Central Connecticut State University. His parents are exiles from Cuba, and Blanco was born in Spain before his family moved to New York City and then Miami.

“I’m beside myself, bestowed with this great honor, brimming over with excitement, awe, and gratitude,” Blanco said in a statement. “In many ways, this is the very ‘stuff’ of the American Dream, which underlies so much of my work and my life’s story—America’s story, really. I am thrilled by the thought of coming together during this great occasion to celebrate our country and its people through the power of poetry.”

Obama praised the pick of Blanco as one that celebrates “our nation’s great diversity.”

“I’m honored that Richard Blanco will join me and Vice President Biden at our second Inaugural,” Obama said in a statement. “His contributions to the fields of poetry and the arts have already paved a path forward for future generations of writers. Richard’s writing will be wonderfully fitting for an Inaugural that will celebrate the strength of the American people and our nation’s great diversity.”