III.
Queer Shoulder to the Wheel
For Jack Kerouac, it said everything about American culture—and his own long-suffering Beat destiny—that the paperback rights for John Clellon Holmes’s Beat-themed novel Go sold for $20,000, at the same time that he was offered only a thousand dollars from Ace for On the Road.77 The real thing wasn’t wanted, but the second-hand version was easy money, even when filtered through Holmes’s stuffy intellectualism and stabs at hipster nonchalance. The commercial exploitation of the Beats was just beginning. It took six years for On the Road to find a publisher, but when it did appear, in September 1957, it was an immediate best seller and went into a second printing within two weeks. Audiences who flocked to Rebel without a Cause burned to read the Beat manifesto, or at least carry a copy. The zeitgeist had made way for Kerouac, his path cleared—and complicated—by Ginsberg’s notoriety as well as by the emerging fascination with the Beats. Oliver Harris, who would edit Burroughs’s letters, described the Beats as “the first writers born in the spotlight of the modern media.” By 1959, there would be a book on Beat culture, a Rent-a-Beatnik service advertised in the Village Voice, and the first television Beatnik, the sensitive, turtleneck-wearing Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis. Soon the embarrassing film versions of Kerouac’s books would begin to appear, as if to cancel out the Beats’ tentative admission to the canon in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking 1960 anthology New American Poetry: 1945-1960.
Their inclusion in the Allen anthology was big news to the Beats (Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind would go on to become the best-selling poetry book of the 1960s), but they barely registered the CBS television series Route 66 (1960–1964), with its suspiciously familiar premise of two hipsters who drove restlessly across the country in search of kicks.
As a former girlfriend, Joyce Johnson, wrote of Kerouac’s sudden fame: “Thousands were waiting for a prophet to liberate them from the cautious middle-class lives they had been reared to inherit.” He was interviewed on television talk shows and for countless articles. People approached him on the street, in bars. He kept his phone off the hook. Joyce Johnson intercepted one proposition from a desperate woman who explained that while Joyce was young the caller was already twenty-nine years old: “I’ve got to fuck him now, before it’s too late.”
But reaction against the Beats was profound, and Kerouac took it personally. 78 A typical article in Time dubbed Ginsberg “the discount-house Whitman of the Beat Generation” and Kerouac “the latrine laureate of Hobohemia,” then described the Beats in general as “a pack of oddballs who celebrate booze, dope, sex and despair.” Norman Podheretz, who would prove a wily and long-lived opponent, argued in Esquire in December 1958 that the Beat writers had “been advertised as the spokesmen for all the hipsters, all the junkies and all the juvenile delinquents in America—as though it were some kind of special virtue to speak for a vicious tendency.” To confuse matters, the media conflated the serious writers and artists of the movement with all their beard- and sandalwearing adherents. “What offered itself as an intellectual refreshment has turned out to be little more than unwashed eccentricity,” wrote John Ciardi in 1960. Even friends of the Beats, like Carl Solomon, could make easy fun of the movement. In a short essay called “Suggestions to Improve the Public Image of the Beatnik,” he reflected that “it is most important now to change the smell of the Beatnik. Instead of using, for example, the word ‘shit’ so often in their poems, I suggest that they tactfully substitute ‘roses’ wherever the other word appears.”
Kerouac found himself attacked by critics, yet offered thousands of dollars to write for Playboy. Always a heavy drinker, he climbed into his “liquid armor,” retreating into week-long binges and reactionary rants. When Big Sur (1962), the story of his mental breakdown, flopped with the New York literary establishment, Kerouac set out on a twenty-day bar crawl of his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, raging that the Jews had kept him down. Between the 1950s stereotypes of the degenerate Beatnik and the left-wing protests of the 1960s, Kerouac felt that his message had been hopelessly obscured: there was neither reverence nor goodness in characters like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who dishonored the flag. The “rucksack revolution” Kerouac prophesied in The Dharma Bums (1958) had come to pass. Throughout the 1960s, young people were dropping out of the cycle of “work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume” that he had lamented, and taking to the road. But instead of the Zen lunacy and spontaneous versifying that he had hoped for, Kerouac saw lawlessness and Communism in the hippie movement. In later years, he kept a stack of National Review magazines near his reading chair.
Ginsberg and Burroughs were thicker-skinned, enjoying the adulation and shrugging off the attacks. Since their first soft-focus boy fantasies, they knew that they’d never be fully accepted. With his royalties from Naked Lunch, Burroughs was able to work for years on cut-ups and fold-ins, film and tape projects, and calligraphic drawings, few of which had commercial value. Afraid that there were active warrants for his arrest on a variety of drug charges, he remained outside the United States until the mid-1960s, missing the Beatnik years and the soul-deadening first surge of Beat fame. As the hipster aesthetic of the postwar years blended into the hippie movement, Ginsberg’s preoccupations became those of the counterculture at large, and he assumed his iconic status as a chanting pacifist, drug enthusiast, and corrupter of youth. He proved to be “irreproachably immune to the rewards held out to tractable, commercial, or socially decorative bohemians,” as Jane Kramer put it.79 “The thing that I’ve learned from Allen,” Michael McClure told an early writer on the Beats, “is social commitment.”80
Despite his commitment, Ginsberg could be childlike and gauche, and his lack of inhibition did not always open doors. He was curiously unable to see things from the perspective of power, as in his guileless letter to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War, in which he tried to explain that the war was an illusion: “you must by now have read basic Buddhist or Bob Dylan heard, texts & advices how to escape from the trap.” He was expelled from both Czechoslovakia and Cuba—in the former instance, for the incriminating contents of a “stolen” notebook that ended up with police, and in the latter for espousing the cause of Cuban queers on television and telling a reporter he had sexual fantasies about Che Guevara.
His organizational prowess, though, was legendary. In a poem for Woodstock Journal, Diane di Prima described being called by a journalist for a quote about Gregory Corso, who had (wrongly) been reported as dead. She told him to call Allen Ginsberg’s office: “Allen will still have an office after we’re all gone and that office will always have quotes for everything.”
While Kerouac was politically naïve and suspicious—and not a little disturbed by the ripples he had unwittingly sent out into the culture—Ginsberg seems to have figured out very early that the critical issue of his time was free speech. Any social change was possible if it could only dare to speak its name. Even after the major censorship battles of the late 1950s and 1960s had been won with his help, Ginsberg continued to push for more openness. When the topic of homosexuality arose with journalists, he would often smoothly shift the emphasis to free speech: “I think it’s pretty shameful that in this culture people have to be so frightened of their own normal sex lives and frightened of other people knowing about it to the point where they have to go slinking around making ridiculous tragedies of their lives. So…it’s necessary for the poets to speak out directly about intimate matters, if they come into the poetry, which they do in mine, and not attempt to hide them or evade the issues.”81
Much later, in the 1990s, Ginsberg drew fire for his defense of NAMBLA, the advocacy group for man–boy love, but made it clear that he saw the controversy surrounding the group as a free speech issue: “Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, humorlessness, anger, and ignorance.” But then he added, with typical candor: “I’m a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too—everybody doe
s, who has a little humanity.”
A 1965 photo of Neal Cassady shaving at Ginsberg’s San Francisco apartment in 1965 shows a flyer pinned to the bathroom mirror, with line drawings of a nude man and woman, reading “Clothed or NUDE: we are NOT OBSCENE.” After the Los Angeles poetry reading at which he’d taken off his clothes to demonstrate to a heckler that the Beat writers wanted “nakedness,” Ginsberg had adopted frequent semipublic nudity as a reinforcement of his message. He stripped as a gesture of friendliness, as a defensive move, as an example for others, as a provocation. A Berkeley resident named John Knudsen remembers being at a party with Ginsberg at someone’s cottage, when Ginsberg suddenly stood and shucked off his clothes. A nearby coed bolted from her chair, ran to the door, and vomited into the bushes.
The Beat ideals of spontaneity, nakedness, and openness to experience are all related, of course, and were as perfect a contrast to 1950s repression and Cold War jitters as if they stood opposite them on a color wheel. When John Ciardi railed against the “narcissistic sickliness” of Beat writing, he meant, in part, the frankness of their mostly autobiographical writings, but also “this insistence on the holiness of the impromptu and…the urge to play the lunatic.”82 Not to revise was to be naked before the reader. Spontaneous prose and poetry is not always the most powerful literature—reams and reams of Beat poetry, in particular, are unreadable now—but the practice of spontaneity and nakedness, of freely speaking and writing whatever crossed the mind, was life-altering. It required a change in perspective crucial to all the social movements of the 1960s: an attempt to shift authority from some outside force to one’s own feelings and experience. And then, naturally, one wanted different experiences, wilder experiences. This is what Corso meant when he declared in 1975, “We brought about change without a single drop of blood!”
The Beats were sexually subversive not only because of what they wrote, but because sex was woven through their existence. It was not something (or someone) they slipped into behind closed doors but an integral part of their professional activities and public image. Unlike Paul and Jane Bowles, for example (included here as Beat-associated gay writers), the Beats had little sense of a private life. Why hide something as spiritual and universal as sex? Ginsberg, in particular, “was the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality,” as Camille Paglia wrote for Salon. “Like the expansive, sensual, democratic Whitman,…he saw the continuity between great nature and the human body, bathed in waves of cosmic energy.”
Being an apostle of love had its benefits. Ginsberg’s sex life began with a frenzy of guilt and self-doubt in the 1940s and gradually mellowed—through the orgies, the girls shared with Peter Orlovsky or Gary Snyder, the loving, musical-bed households he established—to a serene acceptance of his own trade value. When he taught, he didn’t feel he was really connecting with a class until he’d had sex with a few of the male students. He would proposition young men who came to his readings and public appearances, frankly asking them to bed, even if they were with their girlfriends. John Giorno, who often performed at the same events, recalls the shock that would cross the faces of these straight boys, followed by a look of wonder: “This is Allen Ginsberg!” As often as not, they would agree to go back to Ginsberg’s hotel: “And whether it was because of his candor, or how affectionate he was, they always seemed okay the next day. They’d show up at breakfast with him.”83
William Burroughs was far more retiring. Giorno, who had sex with him a few times, remembered him saying, “Why would anyone want me? I look like a victim of Bergen Belsen.” “He would never take advantage of his fame the way Ginsberg did,” Giorno asserts. “He was so wellmannered.” 84 Despite his reserve, and his lingering discomfort with sex, Burroughs had no trouble admiring a young man’s form. In the 1980s, Ira Silverberg heard him exclaim over a boy Ginsberg was seeing: “Look at him. His skin is like alabaster.”
In 1974, Burroughs returned to the States to find that his hipster street creds were at their most pungent in New York. Ginsberg had found him a lucrative teaching gig and also surrendered—with some regret—the company of a young man named James Grauerholz, who became Burroughs’s boyfriend for a few weeks, and then his secretary and close friend.85 The poet and singer Patti Smith announced his return on stage one night: “Mr. Burroughs is back in town. Isn’t that great?” With Grauerholz’s help, Burroughs discovered he could attract big, adoring crowds for his readings and performances. He was a gay punk hero and a decorated veteran of the war against Control.
He viewed his writing as political. “I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally,” he said of his Nova trilogy. “Yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up the marks. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable.”86 His way was not the olive branch. In the 1960s, when Ginsberg was organizing demonstrations at which hippies handed out flowers to the glowering Berkeley police, Burroughs countered, “The only way I’d like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.”87
Ira Silverberg, who was James Grauerholz’s boyfriend in the 1980s, remarks that Burroughs was recognized as a gay forebear, though “it was a peculiar canonization. He was anti-P.C. when the movement was becoming mainstream and P.C.”88
William was a political writer to some extent, but not someone whose concerns were ever representative of a specific political group. He didn’t give a shit about gay politics, per se. The more banal issues like domestic partnership didn’t come up a lot. William really owned that outsider status, that right not to cave to bourgeois standards. So he had iconographic status as the commercialization of the homo came on. He was the antithesis of all that.89
Neither he nor Ginsberg was interested in identity politics or in any of the pragmatic stances of the increasingly assimilationist gay rights movement. Like the homophile movement of the 1950s, it was simply too narrow a vision to engage them. In one of his few public statements on gay rights,90 the essay “Sexual Conditioning,” Burroughs began with righteous indignation but soon veered away to his pet topics of gadgetry and control.
What fascinated Burroughs was the emerging plague. Already prone to paranoia, he saw it as an attempt by the government or the Christian right-wing to get rid of homosexuals and drug users. It was no secret that sex was dangerous. As he told his friend Victor Bockris—before the epidemic—“many sexual myths involve one or both persons being killed. Our sexual feelings make us vulnerable. How many people have been ruined by a sex partner? Sex does provide a point of invasion.”91 He had contracted Kaposi’s Sarcoma earlier (not as a result of HIV), so the peculiar forms of the disease hit home. The whole AIDS phenomenon was eerily reminiscent of the viral themes of his novels. “He thought it was a brilliant way to introduce a pathogen to a community,” says Silverberg. “You could create a world-wide plague in one New York sex club.”
So while Kerouac moved back in with his mother in the 1960s and married the sister of a childhood friend, and Ginsberg reigned through the hippie years, it was the 1980s and 1990s—with their contracting freedoms and sinister global plots—that would be the era of William Burroughs, the darkest of the three Beat angels.
During the 1960s-1970s, the period in which most of the pieces in this section were written, the Beats were becoming increasingly established in the public eye. What had been an elite group (Diane di Prima speculated that there were maybe fifty to a hundred hipsters—Beats included—in downtown New York in the mid-1950s) was now the geographically dispersed but potent core of a major cultural movement. The Beats’ influence has been compared to incense: you can smell it in the air, even if you can’t always find the stick. Impossible to imagine Yoko Ono and John Lennon holding press conferences from their hotel bed in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War without the example of both Ginsberg’s 1967 “Be In” in San Francisco, and his peace activism at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention.
The better-known Be
ats were fêted and photographed and interviewed like film celebrities (there are excerpts here from both Burroughs’s and Ginsberg’s Paris Review interviews), and whatever they wrote, no matter how slight or fragmentary, was snapped up for publication. Thanks in part to the underground press, like Ed Sanders’s Beat-associated Fuck You, marginal work like Peter Orlovsky’s loopy description of giving Allen a handjob could be published before the tissue dried. This kind of immediacy further blurred the line between public and private. Beat lives and ideas seeped into film and the visual arts, fashion, the New Journalism, education, the poetry revival (still ongoing in the Beatinspired spoken word movement), the surge of interest in eastern religion and yoga, and fed the drug culture and the rising culture of protest. They were not only famous themselves—role models for personal freedom and expanded consciousness—but had tremendous effect on pop icons like Lennon (who changed the spelling of the “Beetles” in homage to the Beats) and Bob Dylan, who in turn influenced millions.
Around the time of the Naked Lunch censorship trials, we find a sly reference in Ginsberg’s work to the asshole sandwich of his early poem “In Society.” Once signifying his disgust with carnality and gay sex, the image is transformed through acceptance: the same process by which the Beats grew into their daring early ideas and were able to reach so many readers over the next fifty years.
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