Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  Yet Allen Ginsberg grew up in poetry. Born in 1926, he was the son of a poet, Louis Ginsberg, a high school and college teacher whose work appeared in several major anthologies. Young Ginsberg grew up on the site of a poem, Paterson, New Jersey, the factory town that’s the subject of the sprawling Whitmanesque epic by William Carlos Williams. Allen’s older brother, Eugene, also wrote poetry. Their mother, Naomi, however, had a more fragile, cracked imagination. She suffered a psychotic break when Allen was ten and spent the next years in and out of sanitariums as her paranoid delusions worsened.

  In 1943, Allen crossed the Hudson River to attend Columbia University as a scholarship student. He was only seventeen, but his knowledge of poetry, especially William Blake and Percy Shelley, immediately caught the attention of professors there, including Lionel Trilling. During his freshman year he met many of the people who’d be important to him for the rest of his life: Jack Kerouac, a craggily handsome football player with whom he fell in love; William Burroughs, a boyish would-be writer of thirty with an independent income (he already dressed like a middle-aged gentleman, a look he soon grew into); and Lucian Carr, a precocious blond beauty from St. Louis who loved art and music. The summer after freshman year, Carr confronted an obsessed older man who’d followed him from St. Louis; he stabbed the man to death with a Boy Scout knife. Ginsberg’s only connection with the murder was that he and other friends convinced Carr to turn himself over to the police, but the university began to watch Ginsberg more closely. Two months into his sophomore year, the cleaning lady reported obscene graffiti written in the dirt on his dorm window, and he was expelled.

  He used his new freedom to experiment with his writing, and with drugs (mostly Benzedrine at first), and with sex. He was a skinny Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses, big ears, and full lips. Photos of him in this period suggest a young Sal Mineo with a wider mouth. He tended to fall in love with men who were straight-identified if not entirely straight. They might go to bed with him, but the emphasis was on their pleasure, not his. He blew them or they fucked him, and afterward he listened to their girlfriend problems. This began with Kerouac, who was reluctant to have sex with men. He was more successful with Neal Cassady, who was happy to have sex with anyone, male or female. Ginsberg fell into an intense two-month affair with Cassady. This was before Kerouac joined Cassady for the cross-country trips he would immortalize in On the Road.

  Ginsberg reenrolled at Columbia, then dropped out again. He would continue this pattern until he finally graduated. He spent one summer at the National Maritime Academy and another sailing to Africa on a merchant ship. He added new drugs to his repertory, including marijuana and heroin. He hung out with a thief and addict, Herbert Huncke, and Huncke’s friends Jack Melody and Vicki Russell. He told himself he was getting closer to real life by knowing criminals. One night in the spring of 1949, he was riding in a stolen car with Melody and Russell in Queens when they turned the wrong way on a one-way street. A police car began to pursue them. Melody tried to escape, crashing the car and flipping it over. Nobody was hurt but all were arrested for car theft, drug possession, and possession of stolen goods. Trilling and two other professors, Mark Van Doren and Jacques Barzun, testified in support of Ginsberg—they feared jail would destroy their former student’s mental health. Ginsberg was advised to plead insanity, which he did. Proving his insanity were the facts that his mother was in a mental hospital and he was having sex with men. He was sent to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute on West 168th Street.

  Ginsberg never spoke or wrote in full detail about his eight long months in a mental hospital. This was in the age before drugs like Thorazine rendered inmates numb and docile, the era of The Snake Pit. He was not given electroshock, but he did see psychiatrists three times a week and was asked endless questions about his family, his beliefs, and his sexuality.

  Early on he met another inmate, Carl Solomon, a younger but tougher, self-educated man. At their first meeting Ginsberg said, “I’m Myshkin”—the saintly hero of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Solomon replied, “I’m Kirilov”—the brutal nihilist in The Possessed. Solomon had been to Paris and knew the work of Artaud and the surrealists. His mind fizzed with too many thoughts; he didn’t want to live, but he wanted a lobotomy rather than suicide. He called Ginsberg “the dopey daffodil.” Yet his friendship sustained the college boy during his time at Columbia Presbyterian. They saw each other daily, talked books, spoke French, and played Monopoly. Ginsberg wrote regularly to friends and even finished a book of poems, which he submitted to a young editor, Robert Giroux (who rejected it). The doctors decided Ginsberg was only “a standard neurotic,” but convinced him he wouldn’t be able to function unless he lived a more normal life, which meant giving up his homosexuality.

  When he was released in February 1950, he decided to put his old life behind him. He lived at home with his father and new stepmother, Edith. (His father divorced the institutionalized Naomi yet remained close to her.) Allen took a job at a ribbon factory. He had a prolonged affair with one woman, then another. He stayed in touch with his old friends, however, and continued to write poems. One month after his release, he attended a reading by William Carlos Williams, then sent a fan letter and nine poems to the former physican. Williams was unimpressed by the poems, but he met with his admirer. Ginsberg continued to send him work, disappointing the good doctor until one week, as an experiment, he sent a batch of isolated lines from his journals. Williams encouraged him to go further in that direction.

  In 1952 Ginsberg wrote a short autobiographical sketch titled “A Novel,” that closes with:

  At 26, I am shy, go out with girls, I write poetry, I am a freelance literary agent and a registered democrat; I want to find a job. Who cares?

  While Ginsberg grew more practical and even conventional, his friends grew stranger. After Kerouac published his first novel, The Town and the City, he wrote a wild, new, exciting book, On the Road, that no publisher wanted. Ginsberg took over as his agent, but he couldn’t find a home for it, either. Kerouac grew irritable, resenting Ginsberg, resenting other novelists, even resenting their friend William Burroughs when Ginsberg helped sell his book.

  Burroughs had married a woman, Joan Vollmer, and left New York, going first to Louisiana, then to Mexico. He had become a heroin addict, but he kicked his addiction and wrote a memoir, Junky. Ginsberg sold the book for him to Ace Books, a small paperback house owned by Carl Solomon’s uncle. Solomon now worked there as an editor. Life was looking good for Burroughs, but at a party one night in Mexico City in 1951, playing a drunken game of William Tell with a pistol, he accidentally shot and killed Joan. He was devastated. The Mexican court didn’t charge him with homicide, but he fled the country, afraid the court would change its mind. He returned to New York and stayed with Ginsberg.

  Ginsberg had his own life now with a girlfriend and a nine-to-five job. Nevertheless, he often joined his friends at the San Remo, a dark, smoky bar at the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker. Joe LeSueur, in his wonderful book Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, describes the San Remo as “a semi-gay place” with an espresso machine, a loud jukebox, and fifteen-cent beer. O’Hara and his friends hung out there, as did Auden’s boyfriend, Chester Kallman. Kallman horrified O’Hara and LeSueur one night with an elaborate account of fellating a pick-up in one room while talking between strokes to a half-awake Auden in the next room. Afterward LeSueur told O’Hara, “If you ever catch me talking the way Chester did tonight, get a gun and shoot me.”

  Ginsberg wasn’t at the San Remo on the hot August night in 1953 when Burroughs and Kerouac met Gore Vidal.

  The author of The City and the Pillar now lived outside the city in an old villa, Edgewater, on the Hudson River that he purchased cheap and was renovating with his partner, Howard Austen. Vidal had found a solution to his very contradictory feelings about sex and intimacy: he and Austen went to bed with other men but never each other. They were never physical lovers, not even when they first me
t—at the baths in 1950. But they enjoyed each other’s company and shared support and advice, and apparently that was enough.

  Burroughs admired Vidal. Kerouac hated him, partly for his prose style but chiefly for his success. He didn’t know how much trouble Vidal was having with his own career at the time. Vidal had met Kerouac briefly, at the Metropolitan Opera of all places, and he recognized him at the San Remo and came over to the table. Before Burroughs could tell Vidal how much he liked his work, Kerouac jumped in and began to compliment Vidal, extravagantly, mockingly. He began to flirt. Vidal flirted back. Eventually the three men left to go barhopping. Burroughs soon dropped out, understanding there was no place for him here. Kerouac proposed to Vidal they get a room. When they checked in at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street, Vidal laughingly insisted they register under their real names, saying the guest book would be famous one day. Upstairs, the two men undressed and took showers—it was a hot night. Vidal has written or talked about this encounter several times and says Kerouac couldn’t get an erection. Whatever was going on here, it wasn’t primarily about sex.

  When Kerouac saw Ginsberg the next day, he proudly told him how he had blown Gore Vidal. Ginsberg never mentioned his own reaction when telling this story, but he must have recognized the malice here. Kerouac was angrily striking out at the gay men around him: at Vidal for being famous, at Burroughs for selling a book, and at Ginsberg for failing to help him enough—he gave a more successful writer what he had refused to give his best friend years ago. Somewhere in there, of course, is Kerouac’s own confused sexuality, which he couldn’t release except in drunkenness or anger. (Later Norman Mailer would claim Vidal had fucked Kerouac in the ass that night and destroyed his masculinity and made him an alcoholic. But anal sex was the heterosexual Mailer’s obsession and fear.)

  Life in New York was becoming too close and familiar for Ginsberg. He and Burroughs briefly became lovers, even though Ginsberg was still seeing a woman, the men weren’t sexually compatible, and Ginsberg found Burroughs too emotionally demanding. Ginsberg finally said, “I don’t want your ugly old cock.”

  He left for Mexico at the beginning of 1954. But Mexico was too alien and lonely, and a little scary with the new drugs he was trying. So he went up to San Jose, California, to visit his old friend, Neal Cassady. Cassady was married but had given up sex, claiming his turn to Buddhism required celibacy. It was already an uncomfortable visit when Carolyn Cassady opened a bedroom door one afternoon and found their guest making love to her husband with his mouth. Cassady promptly left for work, leaving his wife and his friend to confront each other. A few days later Carolyn drove Ginsberg up to San Francisco, three hours away, the two still apologizing for what had happened and what had been said. She dropped him off and returned to San Jose.

  This is the first appearance of a city that will play a major role in this history. San Francisco in 1954 was a small but busy seaport in one of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet. The neighborhood of North Beach was home to a bohemian community dating back to the First World War. The city hosted a lively art scene, with poets like Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, and Robert Duncan (Anaïs Nin’s old friend), and cultural institutions like the Purple Onion, a folk club, and City Lights Bookshop, owned by a tall, married, clean-shaven poet with a receding hairline, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  One night soon after he arrived, Ginsberg took the last of the peyote from Mexico, looked out his window, and saw the Sir Francis Drake Hotel across the park turn into Moloch, the huge machine god who devours workers in Fritz Lang’s silent classic, Metropolis.

  Nevertheless, he decided to stay. He took a full-time job as a market researcher and moved in with yet another woman, a copywriter and sometime jazz singer with a four-year-old son. Their relationship was good until he told her about his history with Neal Cassady; she asked him to move out. A few days later, a painter, Robert LaVigne, showed Ginsberg nude portraits of a tall, beautiful, yellow-haired man. Then the man himself walked into the room, Peter Orlovsky, and Ginsberg fell in love. Orlovsky was basically straight, but he responded to Ginsberg both sexually and emotionally. The men saw each other steadily for several months, then Ginsberg drew back, afraid there was no future here. He was in therapy again, seeing a dollar-a-session analyst, Dr. Philip Hicks, at the Langley Porter Clinic in Berkeley. He told Hicks that he felt he should live as a heterosexual. When Hicks asked what he really wanted, he admitted he wanted to live with Orlovsky. “So why don’t you do that?” Ginsberg said he didn’t think it would last and he was afraid of growing old. “Oh, you’re a nice person,” replied Hicks. “There’s always people who will like you.” (One can’t help wondering what would have happened if a doctor had given Tennessee Williams such practical advice.)

  Ginsberg and Orlovsky moved in together in February 1955, swearing to “an exchange of souls & bodies.” Orlovsky was free to have sex with women so long as he also had sex with Ginsberg.

  That summer Orlovsky left to hitchhike cross-country to visit his family in New York. Alone again, Ginsberg resumed work on his poetry. He had been away from it for a while, although he continued to scribble ideas and phrases in his journal. One afternoon in August, he sat down at his typewriter to expand a promising line he’d written about his friend Carl Solomon, who he’d heard was back in a mental hospital. In one furious, inspired sitting, he typed out what became the long first section of “Howl.”

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

  madness, starving hysterical naked…

  It was and still is an amazing piece of writing, a sermonlike march of words that carries a remarkable load of raw emotion. It’s the kind of poem that often only pretends to have been written all at once, yet here a lifetime of experience and craft actually poured forth in a sustained explosion of images. There are good accounts elsewhere of the writing of the rest of the poem, clear biographical readings of individual lines, and smart analyses showing the influence of William Carlos Williams, Kerouac, even The Waste Land. What I want to emphasize here is what Ginsberg and others have said: this was a coming-out poem. There is nothing coy about the homosexual imagery. It is so coolly matter-of-fact that it can disappear for many readers when they now read about men:

  who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly

  motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

  who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,

  the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean

  love,

  who balled in the mornings in the evenings in rose-

  gardens and the grass of public parks and

  cemeteries scattering their semen freely to

  whomever come who may…

  Yet it was highly visible to early readers. It can still be startling for a young gay person first encountering the poem. The sexuality is both shocking and liberating. It was certainly liberating for Ginsberg. He had never addressed his sex life so openly in his poetry, and it freed him to talk about everything else.

  The poem quickly works through the initial shock and makes homosexuality the emblem of all sexuality, which in turn evokes the bodies and minds crushed by society. The second section of the poem uses Moloch as the killer god of modern society. The third section mourns the victims of Moloch as represented by Carl Solomon, now held in Rockland Psychiatric Center in upstate New York:

  I’m with you in Rockland

  where we hug and kiss the United States under

  our bedsheets the United States that coughs all

  night and won’t let us sleep…

  “Howl” works more from sound and energy than it does from sense or logic. Most of the energy is sexual. After years of hiding, sexual honesty was now very important to Ginsberg. His favorite expression of honesty was nakedness. “The poet stands naked before the world,” he said, and it was not just a metaphor. He once faced down a heckler at a reading in Los Angeles by stripping naked and demanding the man do the same.

  Wr
iting the first section of “Howl” unlocked Ginsberg. He wrote the rest of the poem in the next few weeks, then quickly followed it with other great works: “Sunflower Sutra,” “A Supermarket in California,” and “America,” with its grand closing line:

  America I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

  The first public reading of “Howl” took place at the Six Gallery, a converted garage, on Friday night, October 7, 1955, when Ginsberg read with five other poets. Ginsberg read only the first section, but the poem immediately attracted attention. Ferlinghetti wanted to publish it in his new City Lights Pocket Poets series. Ginsberg sent a mimeograph of the completed poem to his father. Louis Ginsberg’s response was both perceptive and prescient:

  My expression, at first blush, is that it is a weird, volcanic, troubled, extravagant, turbulent, boisterous, unbridled outpouring, intermingling genius and flashes of picturesque insight with slag and debris of scoriac matter. It has violence; it has life; it has vitality. In my opinion it is a one-sided, neurotic view of life; it has not enough glad Whitmanian affirmations. (The fact that you write in such an energetic glow of poetry is one affirmation.) The poem should attract attention and perhaps be a sensation; one will hear defenders and detractors. But it should give you a name.

  Ginsberg even sent a copy to his mother in her sanitarium. She wrote back that she found the wording “hard” and wondered what his father thought. She closed by saying she hoped he wasn’t using drugs, as implied by his poems. “Don’t go in for ridiculous things.” There is no date on the letter, but it’s postmarked two days after her death from a cerebral hemorrhage. Someone must have found it by her bed and mailed it. Ginsberg could not return east for the funeral. He was saddened to hear that kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was not read for his mother. He resolved that he would one day write his own kaddish for her.