Queer Beats

  William Burroughs: “A.J.’s Annual Party,” from Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, copyright © 1959. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  Brion Gysin: excerpt from “Cut-ups: A Project for Disastrous Success,” from The Third Mind by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Copyright © 1978 by Brion Gysin. Reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.

  John Giorno: “I Met Jack Kerouac in 1958 for One Glorious Moment…” Copyright © 2004. Published by kind permission of John Giorno.

  John Wieners: “A Poem for Cocksuckers,” from The Hotel Wentley Poems. Copyright © 1958 by John Wieners.

  Harold Norse: from Memoirs of a Bastard Angel. Copyright © 1989 by Harold Norse. Reprinted by kind permission of Harold Norse.

  III. Queer Shoulder to the Wheel

  Peter Orlovsky: “Me & Allen,” from Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs. Copyright © 1978 by Peter Orlovsky. Used by kind permission of Peter Orlovsky.

  Peter Orlovsky: “Peter Jerking Allen Off (First Sex Experiment),” from Straight Hearts’ Delight. Copyright © 1980 by Peter Orlovsky. Used by kind permission of Peter Orlovsky.

  Allen Ginsberg: “Why is God Love, Jack?” from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  William Burroughs: “Sexual Conditioning,” copyright © 1985, 1986 by William S. Burroughs. Reprinted from The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs, published by arrangement with Seaver Books, New York, New York.

  Allen Ginsberg: “Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass,” from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Jane Bowles: “Going to Massachusetts,” copyright © 1943, 1946, 1948, 1949, 1954, 1966 by Jane Bowles, renewed 1976 by Paul Bowles, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.

  Harold Norse: “Horns.” Reprinted by kind permission of Harold Norse.

  William Burroughs: from The Place of Dead Roads, copyright © 1984 by William S. Burroughs, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.

  Paul Bowles: “Pages from Cold Point,” copyright © 2001 by the Estate of Paul Bowles, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.

  Harold Norse: “Green Ballet.” Reprinted by kind permission of Harold Norse.

  John Giorno: “Hi Risque,” from You Got To Burn To Shine, copyright © 1994 by John Giorno. Reprinted by kind permission of John Giorno.

  Allen Ginsberg: “On Neal’s Ashes,” from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  William S. Burroughs: “Sex as a biological weapon,” from Beat Writers at Work, edited by The Paris Review, copyright © 1999 by The Paris Review; Introduction copyright © 1999 by Rick Moody. Used by permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Allen Ginsberg: “Rain-Wet Asphalt Heat, Garbage Curbed Cans Overflowing,” from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Harold Norse: “Now France.” Reprinted by kind permission of Harold Norse.

  Allen Ginsberg: “Drag your soul up to its proper bliss…” from Beat Writers at Work, edited by The Paris Review, copyright © 1999 by The Paris Review; Introduction copyright © 1999 by Rick Moody. Used by permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc.

  William Burroughs: “The gay state,” from the film William Burroughs, directed by Howard Brookner. Copyright © 1984 by Howard Brookner.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Regina Marler is the author of Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom (Henry Holt, 1997) and the editor of Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (Pantheon, 1993). She contributes to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the New York Observer, and The Advocate. She lives a Beat life in San Francisco.

  1 In retelling the story here, I rely on Barry Miles’s Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1989).

  2 The underworld charm of Huncke can probably be summed up by the opening of his sketch “Elsie John”: “Elsie John, the hermaphrodite, was my introduction to narcotics. He was working West Madison Street in a freak show—half man, half woman.”

  3 Ann Charters, ed., Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940–1956 (New York: Viking, 1995), 81.

  4 As well as later mentions in Howl and elsewhere, Kerouac and Burroughs quickly banged out a 200-page pulp account of the murder, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Carr made them swear never to publish it. Kerouac’s account of the murder, Vanity of Duluoz, wasn’t published until 1968. Even Ginsberg tried to write a novel about the incident for a creative writing course at Columbia but was dissuaded by the assistant dean.

  5 On the Road (New York: Signet, 1982), 8.

  6 Guilty of Everything (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 94.

  7 Gerard Nicosia’s biography Memory Babe documented his bisexuality, and Ellis Amburn’s Subterranean Kerouac (1998) exhaustively outed him, attributing his writer’s block, his bigotry, and the drunken belligerence of his later years to his refusal to accept his homosexuality.

  8 On the Road, 6.

  9 Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 140.

  10 Railing against the government agency that was intent on hunting him down for child abandonment, he told Ginsberg: “there’re one million men in this country trying never to see their wives again and these socialistic think-they’re-well-meaning-pricks are trying to ‘solve’ that.” (Charters, ed., Selected Letters, 344.) In his defense, Kerouac did believe that an earlier bout of mumps had left him sterile, and that the baby could not be his.

  11 On the Road, 62.

  12 Even Burroughs, who had tried to psychoanalyze both Ginsberg and Kerouac while they lived at Joan Burroughs’s apartment, and had reassured Ginsberg about his feelings for men, later told Ginsberg that a completely successful analysis would of course cure homosexuality.

  13 Quoted in Miles, 129.

  14 Memoirs of a Bastard Angel (New York: Morrow, 1989), 128.

  15 The book was by Donald Webster Cory. Oliver Harris, ed., The Letters of William Burroughs, 1945–1958 (New York: Viking, 1993), 106.

  16 “With the stress of dislocation and impending doom,” Norse recalled, “almost anyone in uniform was available.[…] Far from their home communities, unhindered by what others thought, most responded willingly to homosexual acts.” Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, 105.

  17 Kinsey’s statistics revealed that thirty-seven percent of American men surveyed had participated in homosexual acts (“leading to orgasm”) in adulthood. His much-maligned study had the contradictory effects of normalizing queer sex while sparking political and religious outrage, military witch-hunts, and police crackdowns against gays.

  18 The term “beat” was a piece of street jargon the friends picked up from Herbert Huncke, with the nowfamiliar meaning of “worn out, rejected.” In one of his associative riffs, Kerouac expanded its definition to include “upbeat, beatific.” Hope and degradation were thus entwined.

  19 Go (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952), 95.

  20 Quoted in Tytell, 218.

  21 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–50 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), 84.

  22 For the most part, these were qualities shared with straight (or usually straight) Beat and Beat-associated writers like Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Diane di Prima.

  23 Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York: Fromm, 1997), 48. (First published in 1969.)

  24 Quoted in Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Time of William S. Burroughs (New York: Holt, 1988), 298.

  25 Edward de Grazia “Allen Ginsburg, Norman Mailer, Barney Rosset: Their Struggles Against
Censorship Recalled,” Cardozo Life (New York: Yeshiva University, Fall 1998).

  26 Ibid.

  27 D’Emilio, 181.

  28 Quoted in Morgan, 320.

  29 Here is where they parted ways with Jack Kerouac, who had described, in a 1948 interview, the Beat “weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world.” But near the end of his life, in a famous drunken appearance on Firing Line with William F. Buckley, he sounded more like his father: “As a Catholic, I believe in order, tenderness, and piety.”

  30 Allen Young’s Gay Sunshine interview, published 1973.

  31 Visions of Cody, the more adoring of Kerouac’s fictional reveries on Neal Cassady, was published posthumously in 1972, by which time its homoerotic content and reveries on masturbation were less challenging to readers.

  32 D’Emilio, 181.

  33 Kramer, 94.

  34 Email to the editor of this volume, Dec. 7, 2003.

  35 Conversation with the editor of this volume, November 2003.

  36 Quoted in Anne Waldman’s The Beat Book (New York: Random House, 1996).

  37 Jamie Russell’s excellent Queer Burroughs (London: Palgrave, 2001) was the first book-length study of an individual Beat writer’s sexuality, and of its influence on his work and his critical reception.

  38 On the Road, 9.

  39 A contradictory blend, since heroin is a narcotic and Methedrine and Dexedrine are amphetamines (speed).

  40 Visions of Cody, 300. A dedicated tea-head, Neal Cassady eventually served two years in San Quentin for trying to barter a couple of joints to two undercover policemen for a ride to work. The judge had not been moved when someone told him that Cassady was the hero of On the Road.

  41 In today’s parlance, Joan Burroughs was a speed freak, which puts into perspective her single-minded pursuit of altered states.

  42 Quoted in Miles, 51.

  43 After Dave Kammerer, there was the prankster Bill Cannastra, a queer friend of the Beats who died in October 1950. See Alan Ansen’s “Dead Drunk,” included here.

  44 Huncke did several more interviews with Kinsey, and afterward gathered two-dollar referral fees for sending his friends and acquaintances to speak with the doctor. In this way, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Joan Vollmer Burroughs came to be interviewed by Kinsey.

  45 Jimmie Trimble, Vidal’s boyhood love, who died in World War II.

  46 A memorable trick who had tried to flip the much-smaller but determinedly dominant Vidal onto his back.

  47 “Keck & Anton: members of a circle of seekers, some from West Coast, friends of Philip Lamantia & Carl Solomon, who hung around San Remo Bar MacDougal & Bleecker, Greenwich Village, at that time a center of Kerouac’s N.Y. social life—described in The Subterraneans, late 40’s & early 50’s—A. G., September 1975” [note from Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties].

  48 Ginsberg’s New York apartment at that time, on 15th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues.

  49 This Bird Flies Backward (1958). Friends had advised her that no one would publish the book because the black street slang she used was incomprehensible to readers.

  50 Leslie (no last name given), a dancer friend of di Prima’s. His lover of the moment was a man named Benny Hudson, who “smelled of soap and earnestness and other Midwestern values” (di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik, 179).

  51 Ginsberg had ferocious verbal reflexes when tapped in the right spot. In their Columbia days, Kerouac called him “Jewboy” until Ginsberg snapped, “You eat shit from your mother’s cunt!”

  52 Miles, 212.

  53 He made rakish use of one of Allen’s love poems to him in March 1947, when he read it aloud to Carolyn Robinson, his future wife. She only later learned that Neal had not written the poem for her.

  54 Nevertheless, “course Bull [Bill] and I slept together one night, too,” said Cassady on the tapes transcribed by Kerouac in Visions of Cody.

  55 Morgan, 214.

  56 Harris, 138. Later, sympathizing with Ginsberg over Cassady’s withdrawal, Burroughs suggested that he lower his sights. Couldn’t he find someone like Burroughs’s Tangier boyfriend Kiki: “sweet and affectionate, but indubitably masculine? Of course [such a companion] is never going to fall madly in love with you. That’s obvious.”

  57 Harris, 201.

  58 Cassady/Ginsberg, March 30, 1947: “I really don’t know how much I can be satisfied to love you, I mean bodily, you know I, somehow, dislike pricks & men & before you, had consciously forced myself to be homosexual,” i.e. to hustle. Cassady explained that he’d been forcing physical desire for Ginsberg to compensate for all he was learning from him.

  59 Kramer, 45.

  60 Ibid.

  61 Morgan, 266.

  62 Burroughs/Ginsberg, Sept. 16, 1956, Harris, 326–27.

  63 Burroughs/Ginsberg, Nov. 26, 1957, Harris, 378.

  64 Dean Moriarty is the Neal Cassady character in On the Road. The narrator is Sal Paradise, based on Kerouac. It’s worth noting that Moriarty’s new wife “Marylou” (LuAnne Henderson in life) is sitting beside him during his raptures on the fair sex.

  65 Dusty Moreland, an artist girlfriend of Ginsberg’s during a promiscuously hetero period of his life.

  66 Kerouac’s concern for posterity is curious, since he was at this time an unknown writer, whose first novel, The Town and the City, would not be published until March 1950.

  67 From Steven Scobie’s account of the Naropa Institute tribute to Ginsberg, July 1994. Quoted in Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996).

  68 The painter Robert LaVigne had introduced Ginsberg to his young boyfriend, Peter, and then set them up together. It was not a painless transition.

  69 Although Carl Solomon was not a writer, Ginsberg described him as “an intuitive Bronx dadaist and

  prose-poet.” They met as patients at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute in 1949. Howl is based in part

  on Solomon’s life, though incidents from Beat legend are everywhere in it.

  70 From Hindu philosophy, meaning “illusion.”

  71 Kerouac had made a Buddhist renunciation of sex in April 1954.

  72 His rented room at the end of a dark alley off the Socco Chico was attached to a male brothel run by a poodle-owning Dutchman who wore makeup.

  73 Burroughs’s young Spanish boyfriend Kiki, who nursed him through a few attempts to kick his various habits, was later stabbed to death in Spain by a jealous male lover, who had caught him in bed with a woman.

  74 Despite his relapse, Burroughs argued the benefits of this London doctor’s cure for many years to come.

  75 From his memoir-in-progress. Giorno is a Beat-influenced gay poet/performer who founded Dial-a-Poem in New York, produced hundreds of innovative spoken-word recordings for Giorno Poetry Systems, and starred in Warhol’s first film, the seven-hour-long study of a sleeping man called Sleep (1964), which nearly caused riots on its initial screenings.

  76 Quoted in Neeli Cherkovski’s wonderful celebration of the rebel tradition in postwar American verse,

  Whitman’s Wild Children (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1988).

  77 The deal fell through, and the book was later published by Viking.

  78 As did his enemies. As late as the 1980s, Norman Podheretz—that unlikely heir to the Puritans—protested the opening of a Kerouac memorial in the writer’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

  79 Kramer, 13.

  80 Quoted in Miles, 212.

  81 Quoted in Alfred G. Aronowitz’s “Portrait of a Beat,” Nugget, October 1960.

  82 John Ciardi, “Epitaph for the Dead Beats,” Saturday Review, Feb. 6, 1960.

  83 Interview with the editor of this volume, October 2003.

  84 Ibid.

  85 Their partnership lasted past Burroughs’s death. Grauerholz is his literary executor and at work on a definitive biography.

  86 Miles, 145.

  87 Ibid., 172.

  88 Critic Jamie Russell argues that Burroughs’s “u
n-ironic, masculine model of gay identity…is too problematic and reactionary to be easily negotiated” and that this explains his near-exclusion from the gay literary canon. Queer Burroughs (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 131.