Ginsberg with his partner, poet Peter Orlovsky, in 1978. Photo: Herbert Rusche. CC BY-SA 3.0
Here we are at the end of a month-long celebration of the life and work of the poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-2026) and I haven’t said a word about his sexual politics, which I described to a friend—who helped launch the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in New York—as “complex.” I know I can’t make up for what I didn’t say and this will definitely not be the last word on the subject. Far from it.
No one recently has written extensively about Ginsberg’s sexual politics, but about 15 years ago, the American writer Edmund White, a force in the LGBTQ community, noted that “Ginsberg bore the traces of the general homosexual oppression of his epoch, but he did more than anyone else of his generation to overcome his gay self-hatred and to take a pro-gay militant stand.” White added that “He was an apostle of tenderness among men.” Perhaps so, but not always as in poems like “Please Master” in which he says, “Fuck me more violent.”
To say that he did more than anyone else to overcome gay self-hatred is to give him more credit than is due him. What about the rioters at Compton’s in San Francisco in 1966 and at the Stonewall three years later and also what about the thousands of gay men around the US who demanded to be treated with respect and dignity?
Ginsberg must have known that I wasn’t gay or queer. He never made a pass at me, suggested we have sex or even touched or kissed me, though we were alike in many ways: Jewish and from lefty east coast families, both Columbia College graduates who were at odds with some of the same Cold War liberal anti-communist professors who would not assign any book by Walt Whitman, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf. And they thought they were free thinkers and intellectuals. When the Sixties came along they wanted their students to be arrested and jailed to teach them a lesson.
The idea of being “fucked in the ass” and screaming “with joy” didn’t and still doesn’t appeal to me, nor does getting “blown” by sailors, both of them sex acts described in Howl. The only kind of fucking that appealed to me in Ginsberg’s world was the kind he described in “America,” where he tells the nation, “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.”
The heterosexual acts in Howl didn’t appeal to me any more than the queer sexual acts when I first read them. Neal Cassady, “the secret hero of the poem,” sweetens “the snatches of a million girls.” That sounds like a macho fantasy and sexual abuse.
Rereading Howl after all these years, it strikes me that the poet positioned himself on a continuum that makes room for many different varieties of sexual experience, both “gay” and “straight” and everything in-between. Perhaps Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels hit the nail right on the head when he apparently said of Ginsberg, “For a guy who wasn’t straight, he was the straightest person I ever met.” He meant that as a compliment.
A genuine utopian, Ginsberg made and shared more than one picture of heaven. One of them was of a big bed with a small tribe of young people all of them sucking and fucking. In our day and age of sexual repression, along with money making pornography and misogyny, Ginsberg’s idea of sexual paradise looks as subversive as ever. We don’t have to act on it. We probably shouldn’t. But we might imagine a world in which pleasure isn’t punished and the pursuit of happiness in bed and everywhere else is encouraged.