Uncovering Kay ‘Kaja’ Johnson’s Queer Network Through the Spectre of Louis Marbury

Even the most reclusive writers do not exist in complete isolation. They operate within complex networks of family, friends, fellow writers, editors, publishers, and readers. Traces of these networks often survive in fragmented forms. They do so most obviously in archives, whether their own or those of their interlocutors.Footnote1 Such archives are invaluable for scholars seeking to reconstruct the intellectual worlds from which the writer emerged. However, as Collins states, “archives are always fragmentary, made up of what happens to have survived.”Footnote2 Accordingly, archives will never perfectly preserve a writer’s network. Much, perhaps most, of a writer’s network is inevitably lost. As a result, any scholarly biography or reconstruction of a writer’s social network remains partial, shaped as much by the absences that cannot be recovered as by what has survived. As Derrida argues in Archive Fever (1996), the archive is not a neutral space but a contested one, governed by institutional power that decides what is remembered and what is erased.Footnote3 Accordingly, these archival gaps are not random but reflect systemic biases. Lapp has pointed out that one of the principal systemic biases which has been identified is the “heteropatriarchal” nature of most traditional archives.Footnote4 That is to say, traditional archives have generally prioritized the preservation of material relating to straight, white, middle and upper class men, over other members of society.Footnote5 As a result traditional archives have stifled many voices, particularly those of the Global South, women, and the LGBTQIA+ community.Footnote6 Writers from these communities have been overlooked, overshadowed, or marginalized. What is often lost is not merely an isolated letter or reference, but the entire web of relationships that shaped a writer’s intellectual life. For such writers, evidence of these connections may have been lost, never collated, or never recorded in the first place. The archival papers that do exist will likely not be concentrated in one archive but rather sparsely scattered throughout other more prominent people’s archives. As a result, uncovering these networks is extremely difficult. This has two main consequences. Firstly, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fully determine with whom lesser-known writers communicated and how those relationships may have shaped their work or career. Secondly, the lack of archival sources means that individuals who might connect two or more lesser-known writers are often rendered invisible, making it harder to identify shared communities, movements, or intellectual exchanges that fall outside dominant literary histories. This article has two aims. First, it illustrates the challenges of reconstructing the networks that linked LGBTQIA+ writers, using the elusive figure of Louis Marbury, a near-invisible but crucial connection between Kay “Kaja” Johnson, Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. Whilst Johnson was part of the vibrant Bohemian scene in New Orleans during the late 1950s, Spicer and Duncan were key figures in the San Francisco Renaissance during the same period. The meager evidence available of this connective figure is collated from a combination of sources: scant references in letters housed in traditional archives, within the primary texts of the writers in question, and fleeting mentions in the secondary literature. Second, this article serves as a call to action for the academic community, urging scholars to help uncover the identity of the elusive Louis Marbury, the enigmatic connective thread between these writers. Any assistance would be invaluable to my ongoing work on a biography of Johnson, from which this research stems.