edited by Regina Marler
2004 (Cleis)
The Beat writers are rarely discussed within the context of the "gay literary canon" of the 20th century. Even though the movement´s three most influential and prolific figures--poet Allen Ginbserg, novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, and author and visual artist William S. Burroughs--were anything about heterosexual in practice, scholarship focuses much more on their process (cut-ups and spontaneous prose), their excessive drug use and alcoholism, how the Beats were a precursor to the hippie movement. But in addition to experimenting with form, these writers frequently poured their lived experiences into their work, including brief or extensive depictions of homoerotic episodes along with opposite-sex encounters, scenes with male and female sex workers, quasi-spiritual orgies, and more. The Beats were young and frequently high, restless and hyper-sexed, and they tried various strategies to document whatever was passing through their brains for nearly twenty years before the Stonewall riots in 1969. It´s a period of time that overlaps with John Rechy´s seminal novel City of Night, a time when any sexual behavior beyond (what we would refer to today as) heteronormativity was considered a mental illness or a crime. The Beats rejected the hyper-consumerism and political conservatism in America following World War II, and were uninterested in identity politics; instead, these unusual artists seemed to be constantly seeking "IT"--through art and jazz, Buddhist meditation and feverish days high on speed, dropping out and hitting the road.
How then do we contextualize these writers and engage with their writing, from a queer perspective? How do we engage with their complicated, and often contradictory and even confusing sexuality, in relationship to how it manifested in their literary work?
With her slender book Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex, journalist and critic Regina Marler aims to shift the conversation about the Beat Generation, focusing less on their various literary processes or forays into Asian spiritual traditions, and more on their sexualities and activities. Her ambition reminds me of the recent Fever Spores, which assembled contemporary essays and interviews to reassess the queerness of Burroughs, both as a cultural figure as well as in his literary work. Instead of focusing on a single author, though, Marler chooses to cast her net wide to encompass as many of the Beat writers as possible, yet with particular emphasis on the main three. The resulting is often tantalizing.
For good or for bad from a craft point of view, a significant amount of the Beats´ literary output was autobiographical. Queer Beats takes advantage of this fact by referencing numerous direct sources. Marler includes excerpts from numerous letters and interviews, as well as selected passages from arguably the three most essential works of the movement--Ginsberg´s poem "Howl" (1955), the novel On the Road (published in 1957, though Kerouac began writing it in as early as 1947), and Burroughs´ Naked Lunch (1959). Readers new to these writers, hoping to discover some queer role models here, will probably be disappointed. None of the Beats consistently embraced their sexuality in a way devoid of conflict or ambivalence, and frequently their sexual desires manifested themselves furtively in ways contemporary readers would find disrespectful or consensual. In addition, in the cases of Ginsberg and Burroughs--who later publicly advocated for pedophilia or frequently paid for sex with underage boys while in Mexico and Morocco--their sexual activities crossed over into realms which are not only criminal, but very troubling morally. How do we reconcile these facts with the power and the importance of their art?
As Queer Beats implies, the Beats were writers and seekers first, and seemed uninterested in the larger world beyond the forging of some kind of personal integrity beyond a society they perceived to be more concerned about control and censorship. The best of this literary movement´s work is "political" insofar as its experimental form, some of the recurring themes within their works, and the high public profile of the Beats as a whole. Yet except for Ginsberg, who crossed over into the hippie and gay rights movements into the ´60s and ´70s, neither Burroughs or Kerouac articulated much interest in LGBTQ+ rights or queer activism.
Kerouac himself drank himself to death at 47, less than 4 months after the first break was thrown at Stonewall in New York; and even Burroughs, who coined the term "language is a virus", was much more intrigued by magic, heroin, and guns than he ever was in the AIDS epidemic or gay rights."
In addition to paying for sex with minors, Burroughs was also married, twice. He shot his second wife, the writer Joan Vollmer, in the head during a game of William Tell that when horribly bad, an incident that he says proved defining in terms of his birth as a writer. But from a queer perspective, what do we make of these facts from Burroughs´ life? Marler refuses to tell the reader what to think or how to conclude, but one can see why these figures remain troubling even today.
Some readers may be surprised to learn through Queer Beats that the openly gay Ginsberg tried conversion therapy, and enjoyed a number of heterosexual relationships with women. Marler shares these details almost sympathetically, reminding the reader that the poet was not only living during a time when being queer was a crime and/or a mental illness, but that Ginsberg had legitimate fears about mental illness, given his family history: his mother Naomi suffered from schizophrenia and paranoid delusions, and his 1956 poem "Kaddish" articulates his mother´s institutionalizes throughout his childhood.
Marler seems less accepting, though, of Kerouac and his bisexuality. Frequently described as the most charismatic and handsome of the bunch (at least when he was younger, before his excesses with alcohol; men and women alike often compared him to James Dean), the so-called "father of the Beat Generation" was notoriously promiscuous, enjoying sex with many women but also at least a few men (in addition to multiple occassions with Ginsberg, Kerouac also had sex with Gore Vidal, and had a profound attraction to his more-than-friend and muse Neal Cassady). In Marler´s telling, Kerouac is portrayed as some kind of "sell-out", more concerned about keeping up public appearances as a masculine "straight" male--an ironic observation, given the facts revealed about Burroughs and Ginsberg, as well as the era during which the author of On the Road was living. Further, I was surprised that there was no mention of his French-Canadian identity or his deeply Catholic roots, and how this may have contributed to Kerouac´s conflicted relationship to his own sexuality. Even today, in 2024, bisexual-identifying people (especially men) are often ridiculed and ignored, their sexuality invalidated; how much worse must it had been nearly 75 years ago, nearly 20 years before Stonewall?
Applying contemporary labels or identities to any historical figure is inherently problematic, as neither history nor how we perceive ourselves is ever fixed. Nor does sexual activity necessarily equal sexual identity. The writers and figures of the Beats are a strong case in point, as few of these figures thought of themselves as "gay" or even "bi"; some are described as "mostly lesbian" or "almost gay", and nearly all were definitely queer. Marler´s book is a strong invitation to look at this literary movement and some of its key players from a new perspective, one focused on sex and its relationship to their public personae as well as their work. While Queer Beats does not offer definitive answers, Marler´s writing and selected excerpts definitely intrigue and will hopefully inspire more scholarship and research into this too-little-discussed component of the Beats.
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