Queer Beats Page 2
Of the three principal Beat writers, only Kerouac identified as straight. “I never was, nor wanted to be, homosexual,” he wrote in protest to an early piece of Beat criticism. Although his novels were all different in style and tone, his public image was based on his aggressively straight second novel, On the Road. For publication, Kerouac had been obliged to cut some gay content, but left in a few derisive references to fags and fairies, as well as one memory in which Sal Paradise, having failed to make it with a girl in San Francisco, notes that “there were plenty of queers”:Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and said, “Eh? Eh? What’s that you say?” He bolted. I’ve never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country. It was just the loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun. I had to show it to someone.11
Despite the urge to show off his gun, Kerouac was well aware of the dangers of revealing his bisexual inclinations. In a letter to Neal Cassady, he railed against queerness, then explained that he did so because he didn’t want “posterity” to think he was queer. He wanted the behavior, clearly, but not the identity. And because he was able to distance himself from those opportunistic sex acts with men, he was in some ways less homophobic than Burroughs and Ginsberg in those early years. He wasn’t forced to reconcile his self-image with the stereotype of the contemptible, effeminate American gay man.
In 1949, Ginsberg was hospitalized for seven months in the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute on 168th Street. His internment had been part of a deal to keep him out of jail after an almost-comic escapade with Herbert Huncke and his friends, who had fled from the police in a car full of stolen goods. Ginsberg was also in the car, along with a box full of his most intimate letters, which he’d thought it unwise to keep in his apartment, where Huncke was storing booty as conspicuous as a cigarette machine. It seemed obvious to his doctors that Ginsberg was sick: his mother was mad; he was confessing to visions; his friends were thieves and queers. Any reasonable cure, by the standards of the day, would include sexual reorientation.12 With that in mind, Ginsberg emerged from prison a “straight” man and embarked on a five-year program of sexual conformity. He wrote to Kerouac of his relief at losing his virginity to a woman:I wandered around in the most benign and courteous stupor of delight at the perfection of nature; I felt the ease and relief of knowledge that all the maddening walls of heaven were finally down, that all my aching corridors were traveled out of, that all my queerness was camp, unnecessary, morbid, so lacking in completion and sharing of love as to be almost as bad as impotence and celibacy, which it almost was anyway.13
This is less a paean to hetero bliss than a poignant statement of the pain of being queer in the postwar period. Adhering to the advanced thought of the day, Ginsberg continually consulted psychologists and analysts in his search for a cure, until a San Francisco doctor finally told him he should do exactly as he pleased.
The Beat-associated poet Harold Norse’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, describes the agony of wanting to be normal, to be accepted. He remembers talking in the 1940s with his friend Tennessee Williams about “the problem of being queer”: “ ‘It’s a curse,’ I said, ‘the worst fate that could befall anyone. We have to hide our need for love and sex, never knowing when we might be insulted, abused, attacked, killed.’ ” Williams answered him in a choked voice. “ ‘Homosexuals,’ ” he said, “ ‘are wounded, deeply hurt. We live with a psychic wound that never heals.’ ” 14
William Burroughs’s response to the psychic wound was to flip the bird at bourgeois values. Attracted from childhood to vice of all kinds, he had been planning a robbery (never executed) at the time he met Ginsberg and Kerouac. When a box of stolen morphine syrettes and a shotgun came into his possession, he asked for help from some junky acquaintances in learning how to shoot up. Although he sold most of the syrettes, his addiction began at that point, both in his intellectual curiosity and in his attraction to the underworld. At a time in which homosexuality was regarded as criminal or pathological, Burroughs was smoothly formulating his conviction that there was no such thing as criminal behavior, only acts declared illegal by a particular society. In fact, if the modest, buttoned-down advocates of “homophile rights”—closeted schoolteachers, librarians, theater workers—had made more headway in this period, Burroughs in particular might have been far less attracted to the same-sex world. “I glanced through a book called The Homosexual in America,” he wrote Ginsberg from Mexico in 1952, “Enough to turn a man’s gut.”
This citizen says a queer learns humility, learns to turn the other cheek, and returns love for hate. Let him learn that sort of thing if he wants to. I never swallowed the other cheek routine, and I hate the stupid bastards who won’t mind their own business. They can die in agony for all I care.15
The problem was that Burroughs, a self-professed “manly type” and gun freak, could not find a model for male homosexuality that didn’t sicken him. His second novel, Queer, is a record of his loneliness and isolation, a man’s man among expatriate fairies in Mexico City. He repudiated that book when he began to write Naked Lunch, the series of surreal, violent, and brilliantly inventive sketches (“routines”)—some based on letters to Ginsberg—that would make his name. Although he longed for a profound connection, a union of souls, he was forced to settle, much of his life, for brief, uneven affairs with younger men—often with trade—and a close circle of male friends. “He was divided between a puritan obsession with dirty sex and his own true romantic nature,” writes his biographer Ted Morgan. In the wake of a failed romance in Mexico, Burroughs developed a passion for Allen Ginsberg that went largely unrequited. Not until the late 1950s did Burroughs connect with Ian Sommerville, who would be his lover and friend for the next seventeen years.
The 1940s and 1950s in America were hardly a steady march toward enlightenment, but they were not as uniformly repressive as pop history suggests. Many of the best-selling and most talked-about writers of the period were publishing gay-themed work: among them Truman Capote ( Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948), Gore Vidal (The City and the Pillar, 1948), Tennessee Williams (early plays and the story collection One Arm, 1948), and James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room, 1956). That mainstream publishers were willing to risk their reputations on gay-themed writing reflects the social changes brought about by the war—the beginnings of racial desegregation, geographic and social mobility, the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill, the expanded horizons of service men and women who’d been plucked from soda fountain stools in Grand Rapids or Tucson to serve tours of duty in places like postwar Paris or Tokyo.16
Despite the revelations of the Kinsey Report, the first volume of which, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was published in January 1948, conventional depictions of gay life remained censorious and stereotypical. 17 Even a close friend of Kerouac’s, John Clellon Holmes, who wrote the first article on the Beat Generation,18 was incapable of seeing beneath the surface of what seemed a pathetic imitation of heterosexuality. His novel Go (1952) is the first fictional treatment of the Beats. In it, he described a visit to a Greenwich Village lesbian bar with all the lurid glow of a pulp novel:The Lesbians were in couples, the “men,” brutal, comradely, coarse; wearing badly cut business suits and loud ties. The “girls” were carbon copies, except for long hair and dresses. The bar was filled with raucous jokes, back slapping and the suck of cigarettes. A few graceful, shoulder swinging homosexuals glided in from the street, mincing, chirruping and trying to rub up against everyone. “Christ, let’s get out of here!” Ketchum explained with unusual heat. “It’s horrible.”19
The butches are not even allowed good tailoring.
Many gay writers addressed the subject only obliquely. Some, like Truman Capote, cultivated a camp voice and sensibility to tell stories that were not necessarily gay; some hid behind ambiguous pronouns (like early Frank O’Hara) or classical allusions. Many wrote openly, but then edited the most o
vert gay content out of the published versions of their work, as James Baldwin did in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). And of course many relied on unthreatening stereotypes of pale, willowy men tormented with obsessive love, yet still able to identify a Meissen tea service at fifty paces. Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar was groundbreaking in its matter-of-fact tone and manly central characters, but he did not ruin his political aspirations by actually coming out.
The implicit argument behind sympathetic mainstream gay novels and poetry is that same-sex love is like any other, and that homosexuals deserve the same respect and opportunities as anyone else. The works of the Beat writers stand outside this tradition. Theirs is the rebellious, confessional, ecstatic message of the shadow tradition: writers like Blake, Shelley, Whitman, Rimbaud, Céline, Henry Miller, Genet. Poet-prophets, seers and visionaries, outlaws, pornographers. “I want to get a wild page,” Ginsberg wrote to the poet John Hollander in a fierce, longwinded defense of his poetry, “as wild and as clear (really clear) as the mind—no forcing the thoughts into straight jacket—sort of a search for the rhythm of the thoughts & their natural occurences & spacings & notational paradigms.”20
However clearly they saw the political issues of their day, neither Ginsberg nor Burroughs were social realists in their work. When they wrote about being queer, they didn’t focus on finding or making a place for queers within society. This is perhaps the chief distinction between them and the few other openly gay writers of the 1940s through the early 1960s: they were not assimilationist. If the culture would not accept them, the fault lay in the culture. By way of contrast, the Los Angeles branch of the Mattachine Society issued a statement in 1953 that “Homosexuals are not seeking to overthrow or destroy any of society’s existing institutions, laws or mores, but to be assimilated as constructive, valuable, and responsible citizens”—a hopelessly square view that couldn’t contrast more dramatically with Ginsberg’s progressive politics, or Burroughs’s disdain for social norms.21 It isn’t the gay content alone that made the work of Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac controversial, but rather its unapologetic outsider status: its rejection of literary conventions and cold-war hysteria, its celebration of low life, its spiritual searching, its sexual explicitness.22
And, obviously, its obscenity. The San Francisco censorship trial for Ginsberg’s first book, Howl, made the author, the Beats, the poem, and the little bookstore that published it famous. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, had passed on a previous collection of verse that Ginsberg—the new poet in town—had given him. A now legendary poetry reading at Six Gallery on October 13, 1955, changed that. Ginsberg’s inspired, incantatory recitation of the first part of Howl, accompanied by clapping and outbursts from the audience and Kerouac’s drunken shouts of “Go!” and “Yeah!” and “So there!,” was so convincing a demonstration of a powerful new voice that Ferlinghetti sent a telegram the next morning, asking for the manuscript. Years later, Ginsberg remembered Kerouac’s telling him, “This poem, Howl, will make you famous in San Francisco,” and Kenneth Rexroth correcting him: “ ‘No, this poem will make you famous from bridge to bridge,’ which sounded like hyperbole, but I guess it did.”23
City Lights’s fourth publication in the Pocket Poets series, Howl was moderately well-received when it appeared in October 1956. Ginsberg went to great lengths to promote the book—as he did with his friends’ work as well—but nothing had a greater effect than the sight of two plainclothes policemen buying copies at City Lights and promptly arresting the salesclerk, Shigeyoshi Murao. Ferlinghetti, too, was issued an arrest warrant. The trial was set for August 1957.
Ginsberg was not even in the country. He and his lover, Peter Orlovsky, followed the trial from Paris, in magazines like Life, where they caught sight of Neal Cassady in a courtroom photo. In October, Judge Clayton Horn declared that despite “coarse and vulgar language” and the mention of sex acts, the poem was not lacking in redeeming social importance—the crucial legal measure of obscenity as established in the Ulysses verdict. By the end of the trial, more than 10,000 copies of Howl were in print. Ginsberg found himself deluged with fan mail, and when he returned to the States in July 1958, it was to sell-out audiences for his readings.
The censorship trials for Naked Lunch brought international attention to the Beats. Although the book was initially turned down by Maurice Girodias, founder of Olympia Press in Paris, and by Ferlinghetti, who found it “disgusting,” excerpts appeared in 1959 in Black Mountain Review and the Chicago Review—the latter folded, in fact, after protests over Burroughs’s work. “Also I was denounced in The Nation as an international homo and all around sex fiend,” Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg. Relentless in his admiration for Burroughs, Irving Rosenthal, the gay former editor of the Chicago Review, published further excerpts in a new magazine, Big Table, which was held up by the Chicago postmaster general. At the Big Table trial, Judge Julius Hoffman—later to preside over the Chicago Seven trial—ruled that Burroughs’s obscenities violated “a cultural and social taboo, to be sure, but not the law.”24 The notoriety that these legal squabbles gained for Naked Lunch encouraged Girodias to reconsider his decision not to publish. He gave Burroughs ten days to cobble together a finished draft from the many unordered scenes he had been carrying around for years.
Soon Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who had staked his fortune on publishing unexpurgated editions of banned books, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, approached Girodias. Despite the Paris publisher’s eagerness to start a stream of royalties, the American edition of Naked Lunch would not appear until 1962, after Rosset won a tremendous legal battle to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. As expected, a Boston bookseller was arrested for selling Naked Lunch. Ginsberg was instrumental in helping craft a defense strategy for the trial that followed in January 1965. Six expert witnesses were called, including Norman Mailer. As the shaggy-bearded final witness, Ginsberg, took the stand, the judge told him to straighten his collar. Undaunted, Ginsberg spoke for an hour, passionately explaining the book’s structure and significance. In the end, without a single witness for the prosecution, the judge declared Naked Lunch obscene. He said that Burroughs, “under the guise of portraying the hallucinations of a drug addict, had ingeniously satisfied his personal whims and fantasies, and inserted in this book hard-core pornography.” 25
This decision was successfully appealed before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1966, to the shock and delight of the defense witnesses. As Edward de Grazia, the attorney for Barney Rosset and Grove Press, wrote: “the Howl, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch decisions changed the literary landscape of America for good.” 26 The trials helped establish Ginsberg as a public figure. And the Beats were now associated not only with bohemianism but also with the rising culture of protest.
Although the number of full-time hipsters and Beatniks—the term coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in 1958 to describe the style revolution sweeping American campuses and cities—was still small, a Beat candidate ran for President in 1960, a psychiatric conference was held on the Beats at which Ginsberg spoke, and countless articles and television news stories discussed the new bohemians. “Even where homosexuality was not specifically mentioned,” wrote the gay historian John D’Emilio, “writers almost invariably referred to sexual experimentation, promiscuity, orgies, and hedonism when describing the beats.” 27 After the Paris publication of Naked Lunch, when a Life article blasted the Beat writers as talentless, drug-addicted degenerates, Burroughs’s aging mother wrote to him promising to keep up his stipend as long as he stayed away. He responded dryly: “Personally I would prefer to avoid publicity, but it is the only way to sell books.” 28 In 1960, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the Beatniks the third greatest threat to America, right after Communists and eggheads.
Most of the press coverage of the Beats was in appalled reaction to their works, their lives, their personal grooming. It highlighted the gap between Beat values an
d those of the population at large, but had, of course, the effect of destabilizing the culture, since the Beats looked surprisingly content with their marginal position. Publicity also brought new readers to the Beat and Beat-related writers, many of whom—Denise Levertov, Harold Norse, Gary Snyder, LeRoi Jones, Michael McClure, to name a few—were poet-activists, committed, like Ginsberg, to poetry as an instrument of social change.29 Later, Ginsberg came to regard Howl as “a crucial moment of breakthrough, […] a breakthrough in the sense of a public statement of feelings and emotions and attitudes.” 30 The first step in the revolution was to speak openly.
The Beat writers’ influence on the nascent gay rights movement is seen most notably in this open avowal of orientation, of acts, of fantasies—the Beat sensibility of friendship (and the influence of Ginsberg’s many attempts at “the talking cure”) extending itself to their writings. Viewing the Beat oeuvre as a whole, Burroughs’s Queer (written in 1952) is the transitional work, as much about queer anxiety as about desire, and full of a cringing awareness of the social taint of homosexuality. Even so, it proved too hot for Ace Books, publisher of the author’s first novel, Junkie, and was then suppressed by him until 1985.31 So Howl—though written later—is the watershed: defiantly joyous and affirming, a Blakean thunderbolt of pride and indignation hurled at the repressions of the Eisenhower era. Nowhere else in the mid-1950s could gay male readers find such powerful, unabashed depictions of gay sex. As John D’Emilio argues: “Through the beats’ example, gays could perceive themselves as nonconformists rather than deviates, as rebels against stultifying norms rather than immature, unstable personalities.” 32 Ironically, Ginsberg had felt so free when writing Howl because he assumed it would never be published. He didn’t want to embarrass his father with evidence of his immature, unstable personality.