Queer Beats

by Regina Marler

  What further sweetness and juiciness issues therefrom no one knows, even him; there is no forcing anything, guilt. (He does not know?) He is already on top of the world. What to do with world is next problem.

  Jack probably feels no remorse, just compassion for Neal.

  I don’t know whether you do or don’t want to make Neal feel jealous… it’s a question for you to answer, but perhaps it is not important to answer it, or it can’t be ultimately.

  Jack’s Mexican plans may or may not go through. Mexico may be a good idea for all of us when we become properly solidified.

  Love is not controllable; it can only be offered and accepted…you know…under the right conditions. As a matter of general course I accept your love and return my own, but it will take a moment of soul-facing and intensity to actually communicate other than words and hopes and general feelings. I don’t know you like I know Neal, and love is only knowledge. Don’t get me wrong. This is no rejection of your desire to come in the middle of the hazy circle, which itself knoweth itself not. Let us arrange all elements to be physically present then.

  I am not shipping out I am sure after all.

  The moment is ripe for me to be in S.F. South America with Bill and maybe Jack and in N.Y., and I can’t be in all three at once. I wish we were all together however. How have we become so scattered?

  What we must make plans to do is all meet somewhere where it is practically possible for us to live, under our various pressures, when the practical time comes. Shall we not then keep it in mind to try to arrange for a total grand reunion somewhere for as long as it can last?

  I am definitely interested in going to bed with everybody and making love…however also I want to say my sexual life has changed a little and with Neal I want him to make love to me. This is something know, as if the jigsaw puzzle were falling into place. He understands that.

  The mileage is too great; we are being tossed around in the cosmic mixing machines. I will make what arrangements I can think of.

  Love, Allen

  P.S. Neal: Write me a letter about sex.

  A.

  William Burroughs

  Bradley the Buyer

  from NAKED LUNCH

  [Burroughs’s famous “Bradley the Buyer” routine is a nightmare vision of homosexual longing that manages to incorporate several of its author’s recurrent themes: control, addiction, physical rot, and the bureaucratic menace.—ed.]

  Mexico City where Lupita sits like an Aztec Earth Goddess doling out her little papers of lousy shit.

  “Selling is more of a habit than using,” Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that’s one you can’t kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. (Note: Make in the sense of dig or size up.) I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don’t remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other….

  Well the buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can’t drink. He can’t get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. “It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty,” a cop says.

  The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or the equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. “I’ll just set in my room,” he says. “Fuck ’em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.”

  But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it.

  “Oh all right,” the boys says. “So what you want to make?”

  “I just want to rub up against you and get fixed.”

  “Ugh… Well all right…. But why cancha just get physical like a human?”

  Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. “Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,” he says. “Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax…. I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like an old rotten cantaloupe.”

  “Well it’s still an easy score.”

  The boy sighed resignedly; “Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I’ve got a meet with him again tomorrow.”

  The Buyer’s habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharge every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It get to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor:

  “Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumors—and I hope for your sake they are no more than that—so unspeakably distasteful that… I mean Caesar’s wife…hrump…that is, the Department must be above suspicion…certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation.”

  The Buyer throws himself on the ground and crawls over to the D.-S. “No, Boss Man, no… The Department is my very lifeline.”

  He kisses the D. S.’s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D. S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost his teeth “inna thervith.” “Please Boss Man. I’ll wipe your ass, I’ll wash out your dirty condoms, I’ll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose….”

  “Really, this is most distasteful! Have you no pride? I must tell you I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something, well, rotten about you, and you smell like a compost heap.” He put a scented handkerchief in front of his face. “I must ask you to leave this office at once.”

  “I’ll do anything, Boss, anything.” His ravaged green face splits into a horrible smile. “I’m still young, Boss, and I’m pretty strong when I get my blood up.”

  The D. S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D. S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser’s wand. He flows forward….

  “No! No!” screams the D. S.

  “Schlup…schlup schlup.” An hour later they find the Buyer on the nod in the D. S.’s chair. The D. S. has disappeared without a trace.

  The Judge: “Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh… assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release.”

  “That one should stand in an aquarium,” says the arresting officer.

  The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthetizes his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Commissioner and destroyed with a flame thrower—the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels.

  Jack Kerouac

  “Posterity will laugh at me…”

  from a letter to Neal Cassady, October 3, 1948

  I consider queerness a hostility, not a love. “Woman exists because there was man—the penis exists because first there was void—(cunt)—therefore, “I have one of my own” (a void, or a penis)—“You have one of your own—you do not really wish mine without envy, hostility, aggression, and inverted desire.” These are my views…. (SILLY) (SELF CONSCIOUS TOO) …and I’m not saying them for your benefit (don’t have to) so much
as for “posterity” which may someday read this letter, all my letters (as Kerouac).66 Posterity will laugh at me if it thinks I was queer… little students will be disillusioned. By that time science & feelings intuitive will have shown it is VICE, VICIOUS, not love, gentle… and Kerouac will be a goat, pitied. I fight that. I am not a fool! a queer! I am not! He-he! Understand? And forgive me for dramatizing the idiotic thoughts I have at moments. They’re of no use to you. I am the Sly Idiot, I refuse to be accused of concealing anything. I am sad, and mad, and I wish I could be sensible like you & Paul & my sister & my mother & Ann etc.

  Jack

  P.S. Neal, all your doubts about the semi-fertilized intelligence of my mind must be confirmed by this letter. Are they? And what would others say? Neal, pretty soon I’m going to start saying & doing what I please and cease trying to be a “model” truth-speaker for mankind. The prophet is always false to himself, therefore hates himself. Right? Tell me.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Love Poem on Theme by Whitman

  I’ll go into the bedroom silently and lie down between the bridegroom

  and the bride,

  those bodies fallen from heaven stretched out waiting naked and restless,

  arms resting over their eyes in the darkness,

  bury my face in their shoulders and breasts, breathing their skin,

  and stroke and kiss neck and mouth and make back be open and known,

  legs raised up crook’d to receive, cock in the darkness driven tormented

  and attacking

  roused up from hole to itching head,

  bodies locked shuddering naked, hot hips and buttocks screwed into

  each other

  and eyes, eyes glinting and charming, widening into looks and

  abandon,

  and moans of movement, voices, hands in air, hands between thighs,

  hands in moisture on softened lips, throbbing contraction of bellies

  till the white come flow in the swirling sheets,

  and the bride cry for forgiveness, and the groom be covered with tears of

  passion and compassion,

  and I rise up from the bed replenished with last intimate gestures and

  kisses of farewell—

  all before the mind wakes, behind shades and closed doors in a

  darkened house

  where the inhabitants roam unsatisfied in the night,

  nude ghosts seeking each other out in the silence.

  1954

  Elise Cowen

  Teacher—Your Body My Kabbalah

  [A haunting presence in the Beat afterlife, Elise Cowen was a brilliant, quirky Barnard College student whose unconventional friends and manners earned her the campus nickname “Beat Alice.” She told her friend Leo Skir that she stole from libraries and bookstores because it was “the only moral way to get books.” Cowen was Ginsberg’s girlfriend through the spring and summer of 1953. Later, she and a female lover lived with Allen and Peter. Her close friend, the poet and novelist Joyce Johnson, has written: “Elise was a moment in Allen’s life. In Elise’s life, Allen was an eternity.” A major figure in the unwritten psychiatric history of the Beats, Cowen was in and out of hospitals for anxiety and depression. She killed herself by jumping out her parents’ closed sitting room window in February 1962.

  It was Cowen, among others, to whom Gregory Corso was referring at a tribute to Ginsberg, when an audience member asked why there were no women among the Beat writers: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.”67 Cowen wrote several poems for Ginsberg, among them “Teacher—Your Body My Kabbalah,” but most of her papers were destroyed by her family after her suicide. Over the years, Leo Skir submitted the manuscripts in his possession to Beat-related journals like Evergreen Review.—ed.]

  Teacher—your body my Kabbalah

  Rahamim—Compassion Tiferete—Beauty

  The aroma of Mr. Rochesters cigars among the flowers

  Bursting through

  I am trying to choke you

  Delicate thought

  Posed

  Frankenstein of delicate grace posed by my fear

  And you

  Graciously Take me by the throat

  The body hungers before the soul

  And after thrusts for its own memory

  Why not afraid to hurt elig—

  Couldn’t hurt me except in wit, in funny I couldn’t, wouldn’t arm in relation but with a rose or rather skunk cabbage

  Just—Mere come I break through grey paper room

  Your

  Frankenstein

  What is the word from Deberoux Babtiste

  The Funambule I

  Desnuelu (who’s he?) to choke you

  Duhamel and you

  De broille Graciously

  Deberaux Take me by the throat

  Decraux

  Barrault

  Deberaux

  Delicate

  French logic

  Black daisy chain of nuns

  Nous sommes tous assasins

  Keith’s jumping old man in the waves

  methadrine

  morning dance of delicacy

  “I want you to pick me up

  when I fall down”

  I wouldn’t and fell not even death

  I waited for

  stinking

  with the room

  like cat shit

  would take me

  Donald’s first bed wherein this fantasy

  shame changing him to you

  And you talking of plum blossom scrolls

  and green automobiles

  Shame making body thought

  a game

  Cat’s cradle & imaginary

  lattices of knowledge & Bach

  system

  Fearing making guilt making shame

  making fantasy & logic & gave &

  elegance of covering splendour

  emptying memory of the event

  covering splendour with mere elegance

  covering

  sneer between the angels

  Wouldn’t couldn’t

  Fear of the killer

  dwarf with the bag of tricks & the colonels picture

  To do my killing for me

  God is hidden

  And not for picture postcards.

  Allen Ginsberg and Allen Young

  “Accept my soul with all its throbbings and sweetness…”

  from an interview in Gay Sunshine, conducted in 1972 at Ginsberg’s Cherry Valley farm in upstate New York

  YOUNG: One of the things that provoked this whole conversation between us was my reading of The Dharma Bums last summer. In that book the character Alvah, who is quite obviously you, is portrayed by Kerouac as heterosexual. There are a number of sexual encounters and there isn’t any indication that there was any kind of homosexuality in this group of people.

  GINSBERG: That was Kerouac’s particular shyness. You know, I made it with Kerouac quite often. And Neal, his hero, and I were lovers, also, for many years, from 1946 on, on and off, at least I wanted to be, and we got to bed quite often, we didn’t really fully…finally he didn’t want any more sex with me, he rejected me! That’s what he did! But we were still making it in the mid-1960s after having known each other in the mid-40s, so that’s a pretty long, close friendship—Neal and Jack, for that matter.

  YOUNG: Did Jack Kerouac identify himself as being a gay person?

  GINSBERG: No, he didn’t. A lot of that [the incidents described in The Dharma Bums] took place in the cottage we all held together [in Berkeley], and then I had been living with Peter for several years. Peter, Jack, Gary [Snyder] and I and various other people were all sleeping with one or two girls that were around. Jack saw me screwing and was astounded at my virility. I guess he decided to write a novel in which I was a big, virile
hero instead of a Jewish Communist fag.

  YOUNG: What was your reaction to that? Did you feel that he was hiding?

  GINSBERG: I didn’t notice. On the Road has one scene in the original manuscript in a motel where Dean Moriarty screws a traveling salesman with whom they ride to Chicago in a big Cadillac; and there’s a two line description of it which fills out Cassady’s character and gives it dimension. That was eliminated from the book by Malcolm Cowley in the mid-50s, and Jack consented to that. So Jack actually did talk about it a little in his writing.

  In a book that’s being published now, Visions of Cody, there’s a longer description of the same scene. It was written in 1950–51 by Kerouac and was his first book after On the Road, a sequel to it. It was a great experimental book, including a couple of hundred pages of taped, transcribed conversation between him and Neal, over grass at midnight in Los Gatos or San Jose, talking about life to each other, the first times they got laid, and jacking off, and running around Denver.

  YOUNG: Why is it first coming out now?

  GINSBERG: Kerouac always wanted it published. But the commercial publishing world wasn’t ready for a book of such great looseness and strange genius and odd construction. It’s more like a Gertrude Stein Making of Americans than it is speedy Kerouac.

  YOUNG: Was it a fight for Kerouac to get his stuff published?

  GINSBERG: Oh, yeah. On the Road was written in 1950 and was never published till ’57, even though he had previously published his great book, Town and the City. The commercial insistency was that he write something nice and simple so everybody could understand it, to explain what the beat generation was all about. So he wrote The Dharma Bums, to order, for his publisher, a sort of exercise in virtuosity and bodhisattva magnanimity. He wrote in short sentences that everybody could understand, describing the spiritual revolution as he saw it, using as a hero Gary Snyder; actually, “Japhy Ryder” is Gary Snyder.