Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 7 April 1997

Allen Ginsberg, the bard of the Beat Generation (which was to lead to the Hippie Movement which he started with a Human Be-In in San Francisco, blowing a conch shell, and later, who also helped start the Yippies (led by Abbie Hoffman) died April 5, 1997 in Manhattan.

He died of liver cancer, surrounded by friends, chanting his Buddhist chants, writing, at peace.

Gays in America, and through the world will always remember him as Whitman's inheritor, going one step beyond Whitman, publicly acknowledging his homosexuality, a celebration which began with his first important poem, "Howl".

With this one poem, and accompanied by his friend Jack Kerouac and his novel, ON THE ROAD, he gave birth to the Beat Generation.

Like Whitman he drew heavily on the East and once again, was able to go East, to India, to China and Japan, the countries Whitman had gone to only in his poetry.

Of Communist parents, he was, in his poetry and his life, to make a protest against America's betrayal of the great dream of brotherhood, but his open homosexuality was no more welcome in communist nations. On television, in Castro's Cuba, he'd noted that Che Guevara's beauty had distracted him from Socialism, earning him a quick plane trip out of the country.

In Communist Prague, he, a communist sympathizer was expelled by the Secret Police, who looked through his notebooks, decided they were a secret code.

Long before Hawaii began legislation for gay unions, he put down as his spouse "Ganesh" Orlovsky in Who's Who in World Judaism.

His unashamed espousal of homosexuality in his poetry was a yawp of delight, never an apology and his letters to his lover Peter Orlovsky ("Ganesh" is the Indian g-d of success) have been preserved in a book titled STRAIGHT HEART'S DELIGHT.

Born in Trenton, New Jersey and growing up in Paterson, he began to find himself as poet (and homosexual) while going to Columbia College, there to meet Jack Kerouac, a football scholarship student, French-Canadian, from New England. While at Columbia he met William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and Neal Cassidy, who were to become, in time, The Beats.

"Howl" and the trial for obscenity that the United States Postal Service subjected it to, in 1956 brought fame and fortune both to the author and the bookstore, City Lights in San Francisco, that published the poem in a booklet with other poems.

Serious critics like Lionel Trilling at Columbia who had begun by finding the Beats and Allen Ginsberg's poetry, not Literature but a social phenomenon, ending up by awarding him prizes and putting him in anthologies of American literature.

The toll of beat life, its invitation to experience, was heavy.

Allen championed not only legalization of marijuana but the use of LSD, being among the first to follow Timothy Leary. Some of the group died like Neal Cassidy died using drugs. Jack Kerouac died of internal hemorrhages from alcohol abuse.

Allen kept on writing, stripping naked along with Peter Orlovsky for photos (people like Richard Avedon snapped him for magazine covers), or stripping naked for company with no camera.

He continued to go from campus to campus, balding now, graying, diabetic, but still a Pied Piper to ever-new young generations, in his readings always putting, in the front, along with his politics, his homosexuality, now accompanied with frequent laments about boys he wasn't going to be able to keep, a body which was needing constant attention.

He had lost much, friends, mother, father, but kept going.

Once mugged outside his East Village tenement, he wrote a poem about the mugging, published in The New York Times, the fee being greater than the amount stolen.

He was now looking forwards and back, reading--now that Peter, his lover of thirty years had left him--a want ad for the New Boy: what he wanted. And looking back, two great poems of "the Promise and threat that death/deaths gave me "White Shroud" written when very sick in China, far from home.

But home he came, like Whitman claiming all America, coast to coast, his collection being assembled in Stanford, California and now, for him, aged, a loft where he could use the elevator to take up his groceries, he no longer able to do stairs.

Up he went, home, secure. In 1956 he had, in a poem, lamented his poverty: "two dollars and twentyseven (sic) cents, January 17, 1956".

Now he had fame, fortune, friends and a body that was going: hepatitis had led to cirrhosis of the liver which had led to cancer.

He had lost his female lover, Elise Cowen, in 1962, she a suicide, while he was in India.

Writing his friend Leo Skir, in New York, where Elise Cowen had died, leaping from a window, he noted: "None of the dream systems is real, not even death's. The self that sees all the plots is worth attention, not the plots."

Now, 37 years after Elise Cowen's death, Allen Ginsberg had joined her, his father, his mother, leaving behind his poetry, his earthly vision of the Self that Sees all the Plots.

_________________________________________________________________________ * Leo Skir's most recent essay about the Beat Generation has recently been published in "Women of the Beat Generation." ed. by Brenda Knight (Conari Press, 1996). Skir once arranged a meeting with Ginsberg for GayToday's editor, as well as the publication of a Ginsberg poem by GT's editor in the original GAY. The poem was "Jimmy Berman Newsboy Gaylib Rag." Prior to its February 21, 1972 publication, Ginsberg made a special visit to GAY's offices where he carefully examined the two-page layout and the proper punctuation with which the newspaper would present his poem.

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