Queer Beats
Page 9
YOUNG: So then your portrayal as a heterosexual doesn’t have anything to do with being in the closet.
GINSBERG: No. I came out of the closet at Columbia in 1946. The first person I told about it was Kerouac, cause I was in love with him. He was staying in my room up in the bed, and I was sleeping on a pallet on the floor. I said, “Jack, you know, I love you, and I want to sleep with you, and I really like men.” And he said, “Ooooooh, no…” We’d known each other maybe a year, and I hadn’t said anything.
At that time Kerouac was very handsome, very beautiful, and mellow—mellow in the sense of infinitely tolerant, like Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, infinitely understanding. So in a sense—there’s a term that I heard Robert Duncan use for poetry and I’ve heard others use it for relations between guru and disciple—as a slightly older person and someone who I felt had more authority, his tolerance gave me permission to open up and talk, you know, cause I felt there was space for me to talk, where he was. He wasn’t going to hit me. He wasn’t going to reject me, really, he was going to accept my soul with all its throbbings and sweetness and worries and dark woes and sorrows and heartaches and joys and glees and mad understanding of mortality, cause that was the same thing he had. And actually we wound up sleeping together maybe within a year, a couple of times. I blew him, I guess. He once blew me, years later. It was sort of sweet, peaceful.
Jack Kerouac
“If like me you renounce love and the world…”
from a letter to Ginsberg, January 18, 1955
[After falling in love with Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg wrote to Kerouac, a little anxious about his reaction to the news. Kerouac responded in good spirits, having just been legally released from paying child support for his three-year-old daughter, Jan Michelle Kerouac, on the grounds of his disability from phlebitis.—ed.]
Your long letter about the sad love. If like me you renounce love and the world, you will suffer the sorrows of renunciation, which come in the form of ennui and “what to do, what to dream?” dig. But if you grasp at sadlove, ergo, you suffer from sadlove. I dug whole letter and loved the Dostoevskian bare Neal bumping in [Al] Hinkle in hall (like the time the three of us bumped in Watsonville and had big poker game with brakemen) —Peter O sounds very great and I know that whatever happens, you will know how to reassure the sad heart therein. Be sure to do that, before too late, before disappears. Reassure canuck painter68 too. Cut out. Or if not cut out, for how can I know any more than Burroughs deal…at least never recriminate, never sadden others, always be kind and forgive and suffer. I suffer from loneliness, long afternoons after dhyana [meditation], or rather really before, what’s there to do? The letter beautiful, I read it line by line in morning, savoring every bit of it, how I love letters from you my fine sweet Allen. And dont ever worry about me getting mad at you again—I swear off of that for the last last time, every time I get mad at you it later turns out imaginary reasons of dust.
Allen Ginsberg
Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo
I’m happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen’s
finally made it: discovered a new young cat,
and my imagination of an eternal boy
walks on the streets of San Francisco,
handsome, and meets me in cafeterias
and loves me. Ah don’t think I’m sickening.
You’re angry at me. For all of my lovers?
It’s hard to eat shit, without having visions;
when they have eyes for me it’s like Heaven.
San Francisco, 1955
Allen Ginsberg
from Howl
For Carl Solomon69
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an
angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan
angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene
odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a
belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death,
or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the
mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all
the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine
drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride
neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the
roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king
light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery
to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children
brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak
of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to
Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops
off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories
and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and
wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meant for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard
wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the
impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex
or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing
but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered
in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards
and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out
incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco
haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping
and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down,
and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling
before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars
for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
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 morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever
come who may […]
William Burroughs
“I find myself getting jealous of Kiki…”
from a letter to Jack Kerouac, August 18, 1954
I find myself getting jealous of Kiki—he is besieged by importunate queens. In fact I am downright involved, up to my neck in Maya.70 He is a sweet kid, and it is so pleasant to loll about in the afternoon smoking tea, sleeping and having sex with no hurry, running leisurely hands over his lean, hard body, and finally we doze off, all wrapped around each other, into the delicious sleep of a hot afternoon in a cool, darkened room, a sleep that is different from any other sleep, a twilight in which I savour, with a voluptuous floating sensation, the state of sleep, feeling the nearness of Kiki’s young body, the sweet, imperceptible, drawing together in sleep, leg inching over leg, arm encompassing body, hips hitching closer, stiffening organs reaching out to touch warm flesh.
Jack, I would think twice before giving up sex.71 It’s a basic kick and when it’s good as it can be it’s good.
Alan Ansen
“The Newport News has arrived in Venice for a week’s stay…”
News Item
“The Army gets the medals…”
Tamed by an income, by beauty and the water,
Hemmed in by palaces lighter than air,
By churches that bring a city square to order
And tactfully arrange a scene, a lift,
By hawk-nosed countesses, by leashed leers,
And by an exquisite civility that shames me,
I have reached thirty-five.
I sip my aperitif, go to bed with girls,
Read the Gazzettino, think loyal thoughts,
Attend parties, dress better, live up to but not beyond my means
And hardly ever get beaten up.
But oh ugly Boston ringed with heavenly light,
Where one lone boy, scared by the draft,
Blossomed through lust into the passion of poetry
Taught by sailors that angels are real.
Black eye, bloody nose, dirty old sweater stained with vomit,
Refreshed body graced with come,
Happy mind, rejoicing that its learning could have meaning,
Dancing spirit with its new-found worship.
Venice, I am not just part of your incomparable poem,
I have my own poetry and my own past.
God bless those American angels from the sea
For reminding me
“There is one story and one story only.”
It promises all and performs nothing
Except to transform existence into life.
William Burroughs
A. J.’s Annual Party
from NAKED LUNCH
On Screen. Red-haired, green-eyed boy, white skin with a few freckles… kissing a thin brunette girl in slacks. Clothes and hair-do suggest existentialist bars of all the world cities. They are seated on low bed covered in white silk. The girl opens his pants with gentle fingers and pulls out his cock which is small and very hard. A drop of lubricant gleams at its tip like a pearl. She caresses the crown gently: “Strip, Johnny.” He takes off his clothes with swift sure movements and stands naked before her, his cock pulsing. She makes a motion for him to turn around and he pirouettes across the floor parodying a model, hand on hip. She takes off her shirt. Her breasts are high and small with erect nipples. She slips off her underpants. Her pubic hairs are black and shiny. He sits down beside her and reaches for her breast. She stops his hands.
“Darling, I want to rim you,” she whispers.
“No. Not now.”
“Please, I want to.”
“Well, all right. I’ll go wash my ass.”
“No, I’ll wash it.”
“Aw shucks now, it aint dirty.”
“Yes it is. Come on now, Johnny boy.”
She leads him into the bathroom. “All right, get down.” He gets down on his knees and leans forward, with his chin on the bath mat. “Allah,” he says. He looks back and grins at her. She washes his ass with soap and hot water sticking her finger up it.
“Does that hurt?”
“Noooooooooo.”
“Come along, baby.” She leads the way into the bedroom. He lies down on his back and throws his legs back over his head, clasping elbows behind his knees. She kneel down and caress the backs of his thighs, his balls, running her fingers down the perennial divide. She push his cheeks apart, lean down and begin licking the anus, moving her head in a slow circle. She push at the sides of the asshole, licking deeper and deeper. He close his eyes and squirm. She lick up the perennial divide. His small, tight balls.… A great pearl stands out on the tip of his circumcised cock. Her mouth closes over the crown. She sucks rhythmically up and down, pausing on the up stroke and moving her head around in a circle. Her hand plays gently with his balls, slide down and middle finger up his ass. As she suck down toward the root of his cock she tickle his prostate mockingly. He grin and fart. She is sucking his cock now in a frenzy. His body begins to contract, pulling up toward his chin. Each time the contraction is longer. “Wheeeeee!” the boy yell, every muscle tense, his whole body strain to empty through his cock. She drinks his jissom which fills her mouth in great hot spurts. He lets his feet flop back onto the bed. He arches his back and yawns.
Mary is strapping on a rubber penis: “Steely Dan III from Yokohama,” she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room.
“Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don’t go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa.…”
“When I was a transvestite Liz in Chi used to work as an exterminator. Make advances to pretty boys for the thrill of being beaten as a man. Later I catch this one kid, overpower him with supersonic judo I learned from an old Lesbian Zen monk. I tie him up, strip off his clothes with a razor and fuck him with Steely Dan I. He is so relieved I don’t castrate him literal he come all over my bedbug spray.”
“What happen to Steely Dan I?”
“He was torn in two by a bull dike. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlor tricks.”
“And Steely Dan II?”
“Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboonsasshole. And don’t say ‘Wheeeeeee!�
�� this time.”
“Why not? It’s real boyish.”
He looks at the ceiling, hands behind the head, cock pulsing. “So what shall I do? Can’t shit with that dingus up me. I wonder is it possible to laugh and come at the same time? I recall, during the war, at the Jockey Club in Cairo, me and my asshole buddy, Lu, both gentlemen by acts of Congress…nothing else could have done such a thing to either of us…So we got laughing so hard we piss all over ourselves and the waiter say: ‘You bloody hash-heads, get out of here!’ I mean, if I can laugh the piss out of me I should be able to laugh out jissom. So tell me something real funny when I start coming. You can tell by certain premonitory quiverings of the prostate gland.…”
She puts on a record, metallic cocaine be-bop. She greases the dingus, shoves the boy’s legs over his head and works it up his ass with a series of corkscrew movements of her fluid hips. She moves in a slow circle, revolving on the axis of the shaft. She rubs her hard nipples across his chest. She kisses him on neck and chin and eyes. He runs his hands down her back to her buttocks, pulling her into his ass. She revolves faster, faster. His body jerks and writhes in convulsive spasms. “Hurry up, please,” she says. “The milk is getting cold.” He does not hear. She presses her mouth against his. Their faces run together. His sperm hits her breast with light, hot licks.
Mark is standing in the doorway. He wears a turtle-neck black sweater. Cold, handsome, narcissistic face. Green eyes and black hair. He looks at Johnny with a slight sneer, his head on one side, hands on his jacket pockets, a graceful hoodlum ballet. He jerks his head and Johnny walk ahead of him into the bedroom. Mary follow. “All right, boys,” she say, sitting down naked on a pink silk dais overlooking the bed. “Get with it!”