SOURCE: Woods, Gregory. “Allen Ginsberg.” In Articulate Flesh: Male Homoeroticism and Modern Poetry, pp. 195-211. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Woods places Ginsberg's poetry within the gay tradition and considers the function of sexuality in his work.]

INDISCRETION

The argument that one's homosexuality is entirely her or his own affair, a private matter to be lapped in secrecy, cannot honestly be upheld. Sexual orientation has as much to do with social life and politics—if only because a homosexual person is well advised to choose approving friends, and not to vote for disapproving parties—as with internal emotion and the gymnastics of the boudoir. Supposedly private emotions, particularly those of writers, yearn for the freedom of release. So, a literature of homosexuality will seek to be affirmative (or confessional, at least), within the bounds of expediency. Clearly, where homosexual desires and acts are punishable by death, homo-erotic literature will tend to be metaphorical and oblique, whereas, in freer circumstances, it will tend to be descriptive and direct. Coming out is no mere fashion, but in several respects a personal, social, and political necessity. Of course, anyone who comes out, no matter how quietly, is accused of ‘flaunting’ her or his homosexuality, as if wedding rings, joint mortgages, maternity dresses, prams, and children were not also, and in equal measure, affirmations or ‘flauntings’ of another sexual orientation.

I offer this preamble, not as an incidental pronouncement on the facts of life in general, but as having direct and central relevance to the reception of Allen Ginsberg's poems. Despite the programmatic use of his homosexuality, sometimes disguised as bisexuality on the model of Walt Whitman, as both subject matter in itself and a spring-board to wider political questions, a number of critical essays on him manage somehow to run their course without reference to it.¹ Others mention it only reluctantly, and by indirect means.² But, of those that deal with it directly, most classify what they call his indiscretion as no more than an instrument with which to shock the bourgeoisie, perversely and without good reason. Leslie Fiedler, proving for once more exemplary than idiosyncratic, calls Ginsberg ‘a deliberately shocking, bourgeois-baiting celebrator of a kind of sexuality which the most enlightened post-Freudian man-of-the-world finds it difficult to condone’.³ Paul O'Neil writes of ‘Ginsberg's public and repeated boasts that he is a homosexual’.⁴ Both opinions can be found, similarly phrased, wherever Ginsberg's books are reviewed. Both miss the point.

It is never properly acknowledged that Ginsberg is working in a gay tradition. Three of the poets he refers to most often, and with most reverence, are Whitman, Rimbaud, and Crane. All three were homosexual or bisexual, and he refers to all three in erotic contexts.⁵ His verse is impregnated with their memory. In his relationship with all three, he maintains his awareness of and affinity with the homo-erotic bases of modern poetry. His less frequent references to Lorca, who also refers back to Whitman, serve a similar purpose. (His other masters are, of course, Blake, Louis Ginsberg, and William Carlos Williams.)

If we start, as the commentators had to, with ‘Howl’, we actually encounter what hindsight reveals as reticence where homosexuality is concerned, despite the fact that the San Francisco police department and the U.S. customs found in the poem enough material to warrant a prosecution for obscenity.⁶ What references there are are fixed at arm's length, in the third person plural, wherein they incriminate the author only by the implication of his enthusiasm. That they are in the vernacular, makes no more of them than what they say: that members of his generation—and he does not specify percentages—found anal intercourse with motorcyclists pleasurable, fellated and were fellated by sailors, indulged in indiscriminate sexual activity in parks and Turkish baths, lost their lovers, and promiscuously formed sexual bonds with women. In the light of Kinsey's revelations of 1948, these (of 1956) are unexceptional. Given the terms on which the poem presents itself—terms of Whitman-like candour and inclusiveness, and of social disaffection—the sexual passage is in tonal, formal, and ideological keeping with the others, neither more nor less emphatic than they. The manner of the whole poem dictates the manner of its parts. If its sexual content is hysterical—an arguably appropriate epithet—its hysteria does not stand out in any way from that of the other pages. The pitch of ‘Howl’ is uniform.

By investing aesthetic value in spontaneity, just as by tailoring length of line to the requirements of breath, Ginsberg establishes an intimate co-operation between poet (body and all) and poem. To excise sexuality from the page would be akin to self-mutilation, and nothing could be further from his purpose. The over-publicised occasion, on which he removed his clothes at a poetry reading, proved more a manifesto than a stunt: for his work has involved a systematic rejection of subterfuge and disguise—if not always of pretence—and a refusal of discretion, as if the poem were a body, to be presented either clothed or naked, in part or as a whole. Ginsberg has sought, with varying degrees of success, to leave nothing out. He includes his homosexuality as he includes all observations and opinions. To accuse him of boasting about his sexual orientation seems, merely, an over-reaction to the fact that he mentions it at all. The naked body does not boast genitals: it simply has them. The emphasis is the viewer's.

Ginsberg himself locates the outrageousness of ‘Howl’ more exactly than I have. In the interview he gave Gay Sunshine, he suggested that what gave most offence in the sexual passage was the line, ‘who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcylists, and screamed with joy’. Not the buggery, but the joy. The line's ending is a deliberate contradiction of his straight readers' expectations, that a buggered man should scream with pain. This and the line about sailors (a reference to Hart Crane) are affirmations of ‘the basic reality of homosexual joy’, and as such contravene an unwritten literary rule, that homosexuality is a fit subject for literature only as a vehicle for pathos, debasement, and pain.⁷ In the same interview, Ginsberg says:

The use of sex as a banner to épater le bourgeois, to shock, show resentment or to challenge, is not sufficiently interesting to maintain for more than ten minutes; it's not enough to sustain a program that will carry love through to the deathbed or help out Indochina. Or even get laid, finally. You have to have something more. You have to relate to people and their problems, too.

Hence, the concern to transcend stereotype. If the poet proposes to take sexuality as one of his subjects—as he must, to some extent, if he is to deal with people—he must move beyond the barriers of public prejudice, or accept defeat.

The truly autobiographical Ginsberg does not appear until the 1961 volume Kaddish, whose title poem (CP, pp. 209-24) contradicts general critical opinion, by being at once the most personal and one of the least sexually outspoken of all his long poems, despite the volume's dedication to his lover, Peter Orlovsky. Unlike those in ‘Howl’, the reference in this poem to homosexuality is entirely personal. It begins as a memory of being in love with his high-school hero, and of wanting to declare himself to him. Thus far, it is a routine memory, similar examples of which are liberally scattered through American and English literature and is not, for that reason, particularly indiscreet. Just one line takes the matter further, by extending homosexuality into adulthood: ‘Later a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head’ (CP, p. 214). The line's verbal extravagance lays it open to accusations of boasting, but is justified by the poet, again in the Gay Sunshine interview (p. 103), as follows:

When I was a sensitive, little kid, hiding, not able to touch anyone or speak my feelings out, little did I realize the enormous weight of love and numbers of lovers, the enormity of the scene I'd enter into, in which I finally wound up a public spokesman for homosexuality at one point. … Taking off my clothes in public and getting myself listed in Who's Who as being married to Peter.

Here is the common phenomenon, of the homosexual youth who at first believes himself the only one, or one of only a few, of his kind. The extravagance of the line we are concerned with is in keeping not only with the tone of the whole poem, but also with its implicit indictment (and note that ‘implicit’ is a word the poet's critics rarely use, being out of step with the view they have formed of him) of a society which allows and encourages such subtle emotional tortures. One's adolescent discovery of how many people are homosexual is, indeed, sudden and extravagant—and might have merited more than the one line it receives here, had Ginsberg not been a poet (again, contrary to his critics) of some economy, as aware that the requirements of poetic form are constrictive as that those of spontaneity are expansive. His attempts to balance the two sets of requirements are what give even his longest poems their tension. As in Whitman, the broad sweep of the poem does not invalidate the compression of the individual line.

It is necessary, then, to accept that Ginsberg's programme includes his sexuality to the extent to which his sexuality has a bearing on his life, either literally, insofar as he writes down his thoughts as they occur to him and refrains from extensive correction and alteration (like Lawrence); or metaphorically, insofar as the concept of spontaneous poetry is more important in what it stands for, than in that each poem should actually be spontaneously composed. We must also accept that he highlights his sexuality by verbal and tonal means no more than he highlights, say, his politics or his family history. If I seem to be defeating my own argument by concentrating, here, only on the sexual side of his subject matter, thereby placing on it the emphasis which, I claim, he does not place on it himself, let me admit and declare the narrowness of my concern; and offer the excuse that this aspect of Allen Ginsberg's poetry has not yet been adequately considered.

THE SEXUALITY OF POLITICS

Just as Whitman's ideals of spiritual and physical comradeship shaped his idea of a truly democratic America, so Ginsberg's attitudes to sex inform his political dialectic. Only with love, he believes, can the ‘lost America of love’ be re-established (CP, p. 136). In ‘Howl’, he speaks of young men ‘investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets’. The strength of their activism lies in their eyes, rather than their leaflets. Recognising this, the police arrest them not for political subversion, but for their ‘wild cooking pederasty and intoxication’ (CP, p. 127). The police maintain the sexual, as well as the political status quo, in their consistent and aggressive opposition to love. Law always interferes with the expression of love. In ‘I Am a Victim of Telephone’, Ginsberg complains of being called away from love-making by someone who needs to be bailed out of jail (CP, p. 344). Wherever he travels, he finds ‘boys and girls in jail for their bodies poems and bitter thoughts’ (CP, p. 553). The policemen of Texas are described as ‘cock-detesting’ (CP, p. 388). Only when in retreat does Ginsberg allow himself the pleasure of identification with Catullus, who ‘sucked cock in the country / far from the Emperor's police’ (CP, p. 545).

If police activity is one of the most visible signs of the loveless state of the USA, then the ideal vision of a changed nation must include some change in the role of the police. Again, Ginsberg sees such a change in sexual terms. In ‘Angkor Wat’, he expresses the hope ‘to get next time befucked by / a Cambodian sweet policeman’, meaning ‘fuck’ in a literal sense, involving pleasure, rather than a metaphorical, implying defeat (CP, p. 316). Elsewhere, he provides the following, partially definitive couplet, on the age of love: ‘O Love, my mouth against / a black policeman's breast’ (CP, p. 338). Blacks will make love with whites, men with men, and policemen with poets. Until then, alas, phallic aggression rules.

The authorities in the United States are either totally sexless—like George Washington and Minerva, the ‘goddess of money’ (CP, p. 186)—or obsessed with sexual dominance, and governed by their lust. The ‘phallus spire’ of Paterson City Hall is no image of comradely love, uniting a peaceful nation (CP, p. 216). The Establishment is too involved in its institutional ‘whoredom’ to notice the complaints and prophecies of its poets (CP, p. 169).

When he turns his sexual metaphor to the individuals who have power in the States, Ginsberg is no less critical. Eisenhower is ‘heartless’ (CP, p. 277). J. Edgar Hoover is both a voyeur (CP, p. 535) and a ‘sexual blackmailer’ (CP, p. 551). The U.S. Postmaster, who intercepts erotic materials in the mail, is a ‘first class sexfiend’, depriving people of their right to joy (CP, p. 278). Henry Kissinger is portrayed as the most unappetising sadist, ‘bare assed & big buttocked with a whip, in leather boots’ (CP, p. 631). One of the most striking of these images is of the effect a demonstration has on the Vice President:

The teargas drifted up to the Vice
                              President naked in the bathroom
—naked on the toilet taking a shit weeping

(CP, p. 507).

The crocodile tears, artificially induced by gas intended for the subversives outside, are not half as surprising as the fact that the Vice President actually has to take a shit. This means he has, at least, some loving potential: for he has an anus, as well as a miniaturised version of Paterson City Hall's spire. When, in ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’, Ginsberg asks, ‘How big is the prick of the President?’ he implies two possible answers: one, that in accordance with the phallic nature of his power, the President has the biggest prick in the world, a kind of atom bomb, forever on the verge of being detonated; and the other, that in an ideal world we would know the literal answer, but not care: for we would have seen him naked and human, but would not have made any connection between penis size and the capacity for love (CP, p. 395).

However, we must not overlook the value invested in the image of Che Guevara's allegedly big penis, which, together with Fidel Castro's pink balls, is mentioned in the first poem of Planet News (CP, p. 265). Leslie Fiedler referred to Kennedy as ‘our first sexually viable president in a century’.⁸ But, as Ginsberg's ‘Elegy Che Guevara’ makes clear, even Kennedy cannot compare with Che:

More sexy [Che's] neck than sad aging necks of Johnson
De Gaulle, Kosygin,
or the bullet pierced neck of John Kennedy

(CP, p. 484).

More loving his politics, therefore, than theirs. Not that the poet is uncritical of left-wing regimes. They receive the same treatment as any. In Cuba itself, he makes love with ‘teenage boys afraid of the red police’ (CP, p. 348). And, as ‘Kral Majales’ (King of May), he is arrested in and expelled from Prague, ‘for losing my notebooks of unusual sex politics dream opinions’ (CP, p. 353). Capitalism and Communism are repressed and oppressive, alike.⁹

The relevance of Ginsberg's homosexuality to these, as to other themes in his poetry, cannot be overestimated. The widespread illegality even of consensual homosexual acts between male adults is a vivid and literal example of one of the poet's central subjects: the political control of the individual. To homosexual men, the state is an intrusive and uncaring force, undermining love for no practical purpose. It is a voyeur who interrupts the performance he most desires to watch. It employs, literally and metaphorically, agents provocateurs, to initiate the sexual events they then disrupt.¹⁰ It imprisons lovers, having judged them criminal, in order to subject them to electric shock programmes—crude tortures, euphemised as ‘electro-convulsive therapy’—meaning to cure them of their ability to love. It forbids youths the physical expression of their desires. So on. The pretence that Ginsberg's specifically homosexual perspective on politics and culture has no significant bearing on how we should react to his poetry, is critically inept. His homo-erotically concerned opposition to the war in Vietnam can only confirm this.

One of the more popular slogans of the sixties was ‘Make love, not war’. It reflected the coincidence of an attempt at a sexual revolution in the Occident, and the Vietnam War in the Orient. These two sequences of events were married by their incompatibility. How could stereotypical versions of aggressive virility be removed, when thousands of young, American men were being trained to conform to stereotype? How, on the other hand, could an efficient army be built up, when homosexual men—barred by law from joining the forces—were refusing to pretend to be heterosexual; and when, in some quarters, human relationships were being given precedence over national pride?

In his record of one of the great anti-war demonstrations, The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer shows how closely sexuality and politics had become linked during this period. One demonstrator said, before the march, ‘We're going to try to stick it up the government's ass … right into the sphincter of the Pentagon’. Another stated objective was to ‘try to kidnap LBJ and wrestle him to the ground and take his pants off’, as if to answer Ginsberg's question about presidential penis size. Although neither of these two aims was achieved, sexual weapons were, indeed, used during the demonstration. Confronting rows of silent, motionless soldiers, some young women ‘unbuttoned their blouses, gave a real hint of cleavage, smiled in the soldier's eye, gave a devil laugh, then a bitch belly laugh at the impotence of the man's position in a uniform, helpless to reach out and take her’.¹¹ To some, it seemed as if the young people of America really were living through the plot of Hair, the musical in which the demands of the war interfere with a generation's sexual rites and rights.

In Out Now!, his account of the anti-war movement, Fred Halstead makes an important point about the Gay Liberation Movement's presence at demonstrations against American involvement in Vietnam. He says, ‘The gay rights movement was just beginning to assert itself in a dramatic public way. It still wasn't easy in most places for gays to demonstrate by themselves. But on anti-war demonstrations during this period, and especially on the April 24 [1971] marches in Washington and San Francisco, they could come out in full force without fear of harassment and show themselves to be a significant part of the population.’¹² A movement committed to peace and love would have been ill advised to turn on those in its midst who demanded the loosening of oppressive sexual constraints. Therefore, given the mood of the time, confronting war with love, it was possible for a speaker to cover demands for peace and gay liberation in a single sentence, such as John Kerry's denouncement of a ‘government more worried by the legality of where we sleep than by the legality of where we drop bombs’.¹³ Considering various poets who wrote in opposition to the war, James F. Mersmann says: ‘All freedoms have been in demand, but for many protestors sexual freedom has been one of the stronger obsessions. It is understandable, then, that these poets should frequently compare the obscenity of war with the sex-related “obscenities” that the establishment fears, and come to see war as the inevitable expression of the establishment's repressed and perverted sexuality.’¹⁴

Allen Ginsberg's opposition to the war took such forms. According to his analysis, the United States had submitted to the influence of a ‘war-creating Whore of Babylon’, by involving themselves ignobly in the affairs of south-east Asia (CP, p. 170). In ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ (CP, pp. 404–5), he provides the image of

boys with sexual bellies aroused
                    chilled in the heart by the mailman
with a letter from an aging white haired General
                    Director of selection for service in
                                                            Deathwar[.]

On one occasion, he gave such boys the following advice on how to dodge the draft: ‘Make it inconvenient for them to take you, tell them you love them, tell them you slept with me’.¹⁵ To make love with Ginsberg, or with any other man, made any man ineligible to fight the Viet Cong. Ginsberg's belief that ‘only boys' flesh singing / can show the warless way’ (CP, p. 452) was meant to show the way to an immediate, practical means of draft evasion, as well as to state in broader terms his sexual philosophy. When, in the same poem (CP, p. 432), he wills two soldiers on a train to give up their conversation on Cambodia, and to fuck him instead, he maintains a similar balance between the practical suggestion on how to get thrown out of the forces for engaging in homosexual activity, and faith in an ideal world, where men would go rather to bed than to war.

Ginsberg resolves to substitute for the ‘loveless bombs’ of the armed forces (CP, p. 142) ‘lovely / bombs’ of his own devising (CP, p. 236). One of them is a line in ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’: ‘I here declare the end of the War!’ (CP, p. 407). Fred Halstead's comment on this declaration—or, at least, on a version of it made in November 1966—is his only mention of Ginsberg in his long account of the anti-war movement, and displays a representative bewilderment at Ginsberg's tactics. He interprets the declaration as a deliberate means of ignoring or forgetting the real issues at stake. Ginsberg's remarks ‘made me angry at the time because what we all needed in those days was some inspiration to hold on and reach out, not advice on how to put the problem out of mind. There was already too much of that in a variety of forms.’¹⁶ Needless to say, Ginsberg never advocated the closing of minds to the war. He did seem to believe that individuals could collectively will a withdrawal from Vietnam, by refusing to give the war support of any kind. On that understanding, any individual could make a personal declaration of peace, thereby dissociating her or his mind and body from the carnage. By January 1967, Ginsberg had adopted a slightly different position, declaring, ‘I hope we lose this war’ (CP, p. 478).

THE POLITICS OF SEXUALITY

Whilst he classifies and describes the sexuality of politics, clarifying links between areas previously considered incompatible (the personal and the political), Ginsberg also pays attention to the complementary matter of the politics of sexuality. Given that political conditions reflect sexual attitudes, we may conclude that positive political change must be accompanied by sexual revolution. The Cuban revolution turns out to be extending pre-revolutionary Catholic moral control and the rules of Hispanic machismo, having taken place within rigid assumptions of masculine and feminine role, the virility of violence, and the heroism of the proletarian male. One form of oppression replaced by another, albeit more egalitarian than the first. Ginsberg's hopes for America involve far less crude mechanisms of change and progress. In order to overcome the ‘lackloves of Capitals & Congresses / who make sadistic noises / on the radio’, one must create love for them, thereby softening the violent edge in their voices. ‘Who Be Kind To’ ends with the optimistic remark,

That a new kind of man has come to his bliss
                    to end the cold war he has borne
                    against his own kind flesh
                    since the days of the snake.

(CP, p. 362).

The effort Ginsberg has continuously put into becoming such a new man is visible and instructive.

The first requirement of a society seeking to attain Whitman's democratic ideal is a collective awareness of individual sexual conditions and desires. When Ginsberg writes of the ‘assholes basic to Modern Democracy’ (CP, p. 279), he states the crux of his belief in the interdependence of sexual and political freedom, and in the virtual synonymity of repression and oppression. The constipation of the presidents of banks and nations alike is intimately linked to their obsession with that useless commodity, gold. The hoarding of lucre and faeces negates all the pleasurable functions of the anus. In fact, as Ginsberg writes in ‘Chicago to Salt Lake by Air’, prosperity comes with an accumulation not of gold, but of orgasms. Furthermore, in the Capitalist system, ‘It's a gold crisis! not enuf orgasms to go round’ (CP, p. 491). The way to a solution of this problem is suggested in the poem ‘Kiss Ass’ (CP, p. 493), which reads as follows:

Kissass is the Part of Peace
America will have to Kissass Mother Earth
Whites have to Kissass Blacks, for Peace and Pleasure,
Only Pathway to Peace, Kissass.

The image is of anilingus, not, of course, as a pleasurable humiliation or a form of homage to a superior—as it is, for instance, in ‘Please Master’—but as the most intimate means of expressing love and of giving and taking pleasure. It is, emphatically, an erotic act between equals. As a symbol, it covers most of the areas of Ginsberg's sexual and political concern. The anus is a levelling agent, since (theoretically) every one of us has one, whether we are female or male, white or black, homosexual or heterosexual, rich or poor, president or dissident. The anus is the focus of the heterosexual repression which fuels male homosexual oppression, and must be set free to set free. The relationship between inanimates such as America and the Earth should be like that between two lovers, each gently tongueing the other's anus. America's relationship with other nations should be of the same type, devoid of the pride and distrust which characterise it now. This is, indeed, a true kiss of peace.

I have mentioned Ginsberg's visible effort to practise what he preaches, by becoming a new kind of man. This effort becomes most apparent whenever he writes in detail about women's bodies, a subject which arises frequently, when he worries about his childlessness. The image he projects of woman's body is based on memories of his mother, Naomi, who is so vividly present throughout ‘Kaddish’. He remembers her in her hospitals and asylums, places where the social intercourse of family life is reduced to a condition of (often) naked physical presence and howled recriminations. In one terrible scene, Naomi vomits, shits, and pisses, all at once: ‘convulsions and red vomit coming out of her mouth—diarrhea water exploding from her behind—on all fours in front of the toilet—urine running between her legs—left retching on the tile floor smeared with her black feces’ (CP, p. 218). Her body seems to eject a limitless amount of waste from every orifice, as if calculating to shock, if not to disgust. On another occasion, she draws up her dress in her son's presence, exposing a ‘big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole?’ His reaction to these tattered remnants of flesh is important: ‘I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way’ (CP, p. 219). Despite the power of his imagery and diction, and the extremity of his mother's condition, Ginsberg's reaction is oddly muted. After a while, he is ‘a little’ revolted. What has captured his imagination—woman's body (albeit in the worst state of disintegration) and the mechanics of sexual reproduction—prevents outright disgust, by fascinating him. I am reminded of the image, in ‘Magic Psalm’, of a ‘Softmouth Vagina that enters my brain from above’ (CP, p. 255)—the revolutionised female principle, having acquired the hitherto only phallic capacity to penetrate, gently presses its way into the poet's mind, where concentration on his theme becomes a cerebral but productive form of intercourse. The ‘vaginal’ brain gives birth to the following considerations.

‘He inserts his penis into her vagina.’ Formal sex education begins and, customarily, ends with this classically inadequate sentence; or with some variation on it. The young Allen Ginsberg regarded it as ‘a weird explanation!’ (CP, p. 346). But his instinctive distaste for any purely mechanical version of sexual intercourse—in this case, the insertion of one organ into another, for a reproductive purpose—has to be overcome, later, when he decides that he must impregnate a woman, in order to father a child. Uncharacteristically, therefore, in such poems as ‘This Form of Life Needs Sex’, he dwells on the need to carry out a particular, narrowly-defined act—insertion and emission—regardless of his and his partner's probable lack of feeling for each other. She is reduced to functioning as the receptacle for his sperm. He is reduced to functioning as sperm source. Their intercourse would be ‘ignorant Fuckery’, rather than love-making (CP, p. 284). The intervention of one of his gurus settled the matter. His advice was firm: ‘Give up desire for children’.¹⁷ The temporary obsession with offspring was false to his sexuality, to his respect for women, and to his aesthetics; and was, as far as one can tell, discarded as falsehood.

In a number of poems, Ginsberg emulates the sexual egalitarianism of Whitman, by celebrating a female, as well as a male subject. Like Whitman, he, too, sometimes fails to convince. When he writes that ‘it's too long that I've sat up in bed / without anyone to touch on the knee, man / or woman I don't care what anymore’, he speaks out of exasperation, rather than any real desire to make love to either woman or man (CP, p. 183). The urgent need for love may lead him into a woman's arms, but only—on this occasion, at least—as a last resort. A similar imbalance of desire is evident in the following declaration: ‘I delight in a woman's belly, youth stretching his breasts and things to sex, the cock sprung inward / gassing its seed in the lips of Yin’ (CP, p. 259). The reference to woman is formal and unenthusiastic, expressive merely of a static idea of desirable women, a theory. On the other hand, the reference to the boy quickly covers several erogenous zones, which move under the poet's words as if, literally, under his tongue, stretching out in the ecstasy which leads to the mention and emission of seed. The reference to the woman is brief, exact, and minimal; that to the boy is leisurely, exploratory, and metaphoric. There is no comparison. Even though the poet's duty is done, his personality remains clear and unembarrassed. The object of the duty is defeated.

Perhaps the most successful of the poems of bisexual celebration is the famous ‘Love Poem on Theme by Whitman’ (CP, p. 115). Here, as Ginsberg imagines lying between bride and groom, and making love to both, he avoids his own and Whitman's frequent error, of alternating references to man and woman, which beg to be contrasted (as above). Here, he mixes references to the two genders into a polymorphous whole, into which defining characteristics only occasionally intrude.¹⁸ The result is an admirable expression of that human condition to which neither of the limiting epithets ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ applies. The emphasis is on shared physical detail, such as shoulders, breasts, buttocks, lips, hands, and bellies—apart from one reference to a ‘cock in the darkness driven tormented and attacking’, but even this could be either the poet's or the groom's. An orifice is left uncategorised as a ‘hole’. At the climax, when ‘white come’ flows ‘in the swirling sheets’, the three seem to merge even into their surroundings, as well as into each other. However, this was an early, Utopian piece, somewhat undermined by the later poems of distaste for female flesh. In order to come any closer to the distant ideal, which has remained unchanged since the writing of ‘Love Poem on Theme by Whitman’, Ginsberg had first to pass through the matter of the sexism of sexual orientation. The love poem establishes a goal, but the poems of distaste were calculated to show how far he still was from it.

The next stage in the development of his sexual politics came with the slow acceptance of and growth into his own middle age. Even at the early age of 33, he let out the frustrated whine, ‘my hair's falling out I've got a belly I'm sick of sex’ (1959: CP, p. 229). Later, he admits to being ‘rueful of the bald front of my skull and the gray sign of time in my beard’ (1965: CP, p. 352). He begs a sexual master to ‘put your rough hands on my bald hairy skull’ (1968: CP, p. 494). He combs his ‘gray glistening beard’ (1969: CP, p. 536). He complains, ‘I'll never get laid again’ (1973: CP, p. 596). Finally, he sings the ‘Sickness Blues’, augmenting his ‘don't want to fuck no more’ with the new theme, ‘can't get it up no more’ (1975: CP, p. 639). Remember, on the other hand, that he is still writing his habitually lusty verses, such as ‘Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass’ (1974: CP, p. 613) and ‘Come All Ye Brave Boys’ (1975: CP, p. 637). In the Gay Sunshine interview (1972), he says: ‘I find, as I'm growing older, no less flutterings of delightful desire in my belly and abdomen. But also I'm becoming more tolerant of other resolutions between people besides sex’ (p. 101). This is crucial to the direction his latest poetry seems to be taking.

Later in the interview (p. 102), Ginsberg describes his relationship with a young Australian. Theirs was that kind of ‘platonic friendship in which people sleep together naked, caressing each other, but [if they are men] don't come, saving their seed for yogic or other reasons’. In other words, they practised a form of carezza, as recommended by Whitman and Carpenter. With the Australian, Ginsberg says, ‘I was feeling another kind of very subtle, ethereal orgasm that seemed to occupy the upper portions of the body rather than the genital area’. In this way, ‘You can get real close with people that you love who wouldn't otherwise want to sleep with you sexually’. Carezza allows the formation of a physical, erotic relationship between, for example, two ‘heterosexual’ men; or a ‘homosexual’ woman and man; or a youth and an old-age pensioner. It may lead to a ‘full’ sexual relationship, or not. If not, no matter: for carezza is sufficient expression of desire. It fails, not conventionally, with absence of erection, but with lack of love. The criteria by which great lovers are assessed are no longer the size and potency of his penis or the shapeliness of her breasts and bottom; but their capacity for love, regardless of artificial divisions set up between races, ages, and genders. The last two poems of Mind Breaths, ‘I Lay Love on my Knee’ and ‘Love Replied’, state the case for carezza in the simplest terms. The beloved youth Love asks Ginsberg to concentrate less ardently on genital caresses: for ‘I myself am not queer / Tho I hold your heart dear’. He invites kisses on his heart, ‘my public part’, rather than his penis; yet still offers the poet ‘All the love I can give’ (CP, p. 685).

Because of his insistence on providing an individual perspective on his subjects, Ginsberg's sexual politics have never been the most sophisticated. He always allows—indeed, expects—his prejudices to interfere with his principles, in order to show as honestly as possible the distance between the real and the ideal. He refuses to hide his sexism, lest he be allowed to forget it and the need to eradicate it. He seeks not only to provide an ideal system of sexual politics, but to show how the individual must wrestle with her or his own life, in order to satisfy the best systems proposed by the better theorists. His current preoccupation with the pairing of old man and youth arises out of his undiminished desire to make love with young men. It is not necessarily proposed as the solution to any general problem, but as one aspect of the continuation of his own personality.

THE PHALLUS AND BEYOND

In one of the most impressive of his love poems, ‘Journal Night Thoughts’, Ginsberg produces the image of a man ‘born with genitals all over / his body’ (CP, p. 269). This male equivalent of Diana of Ephesus, the multi-breasted Earth-Mother-Goddess, stands for all of the positive qualities the poet sees in phallic sexuality: the distinct, but conjoined powers of phallus and seed. In order to examine these, we must first consider ‘Please Master’, the poem which most explicitly and enthusiastically celebrates the physical power of the male body and of its phallus in particular (CP, pp. 494-5).

The repeated phrase, ‘please master’, carries several meanings, occasionally all at once. It is the subservient introduction to a request (Please, master, may I …) or an imperative (Give the master pleasure, or Please master me). When it works as an imperative, it is the subservient partner's means of controlling (that is, of mastering) the master's means of controlling him. The slave-as-master orders the master-as-slave to carry out the actions which will supplement the multiplicity of their roles. One is the verbal, the other the physical master of their bout.

Furthermore, most elements of the poem, like the poet's ‘bald hairy skull’, are amalgams of opposites. Fellatio is both verbal and mute, since the ‘dumb’ penis fills the throat of the fellator as the sound of his voice, which goes on speaking. The penis itself is both gentle and rough. It is ‘delicate’, but has the hot ‘barrel’ of a fired pistol. It is both hard metal and pliant flesh. The hands of the master both caress the poet, stroking his neck, and crucify him on a frame of tables and chairs. The poet himself, bent over the table, is being crucified and loved at once. His position is that of a child, being or about to be beaten, as well as that of a poet, poring over the book he is writing.

As the master's ‘vehicle’, the poet thinks of himself as a mere object, to be manipulated by the master for purely selfish ends, an automobile to take him where he wants to go. But ‘drive me thy vehicle’ also means Drive your vehicle (penis) for me, where the penis is the speedy and dangerous, but pleasure-giving machine, which in its past is known to have frequented the appropriate urban areas of Denver and Brooklyn and the car lots of Paris. To drive this car is to experience the quickening rhythm of sexual intercourse, the throbbing ‘thrill-plunge & pull-back-bounce & push down’ of the excited penis, and the danger of impending catastrophe: the sudden crash, bloodshed, and a scream. Again, we are faced with the problem of deciding which of the two partners is in the driving seat, and which the passenger. (The motoring image reappears in a later poem, when the poet addresses all ‘heroic half naked young studs / That drive automobiles through vaginal blood’ (CP, p. 637).)

Since ‘Please Master’ is the poem's title, we can read the poet's sexual requests as being addressed to the poem itself, calling on it by name. The poem speaks to itself. It is its own masturbatory fantasy, its own resulting orgasm, and its own master and slave. It exists only as the fantasy of sexual intercourse between itself and itself. The reader's involvement is lessened by the nagging suspicion that the poet's claimed involvement is counterfeit, because he must have been taking notes throughout the session he describes. He must have touched lips to the lover's thigh, then swiftly jotted down that it was ‘hard muscle hairless’; kissed the anus, then noted that it was rosy (and for how long did he ponder on the association of anus and opening bloom?); sucked the penis, then noticed its similarity to a gun; felt it thrust in his rectum, and written a brief history of the master's cosmopolitan sex life; sensed the orgasm, then scribbled a quick memo to the effect that he loves the man who is inside him. Perhaps he merely loves him in gratitude, for providing the material for another publishable poem.

In the first fourteen lines of the poem, the master is immobile and passive, like a statue, and it is here that his physique is most fully explored by the ‘I’, the slave. In these lines, we move swiftly from cheek to feet to belly, thighs, ankles, thighs, stomach, buttocks, pubic hair, anus, and balls. … But when the master breaks into action, paradoxically, his physique seems limited to the monstrous penis (‘your thick shaft’, ‘your prick-heart’, ‘your dumb hardness’, ‘your delicate flesh-hot prick barrel veined’, ‘your shaft’, ‘your cock head’, ‘it’, ‘your droor thing’, ‘the prick trunk’, ‘your sword’, ‘the tip’, ‘your self’, and ‘your selfsame sweet heat-rood’) and to those few other parts of the body which, by forcing the slave's body into a fuckable position and lubricating his anus, directly serve the penis's needs. These are, primarily, the arms and hands (‘your rough hands’, ‘strong thumbed’, ‘grab’, ‘your hand's rough stroke’, ‘your palm’, ‘your thumb stroke’, ‘your elbows’, ‘your arms’, ‘your fingers’, and ‘your palms’). In addition, his thighs push the penis, and his mouth provides spit with which to lubricate it. Even his eyes, the only other part of him explicitly involved in the action (‘please look into my eyes’, ‘stare in my eye’, the slave begs him), contribute only to the elaborate menace of his genital power. They glare, without blinking. Surely, they stare, not into the slave's eyes, but at the plunging penis.

There are two slaves here, then; two physiques, serving one master: the master's penis. Remember, the slave refers to it as ‘your self’, as though the rest of his body were that of a third person, a mediator, obediently guiding the master's penis into the slave, and submissive to the point of humiliating absence from the action. In the throat of the slave, the word ‘love’ is a meaningful scream of delight, whose meaning is not ‘love’.

However, two slaves serve a master (the penis), who is in turn enslaved to a fourth element in the poem. Being, above all, a celebration of ‘passivity’ (that is, of being penetrated), ‘Please Master’ has as its true focus the arse of the speaker (‘my ass’, ‘my backside’, ‘my hole’, ‘hairmouth’, ‘my wrinkled self-hole’, ‘my behind’, ‘my rear’, ‘my asshalfs’, ‘the bottom’, ‘my ass’, ‘my belly’, ‘my asshole’, ‘a wet asshole’, and ‘soft drip-flesh’). The poem's apparently single-minded obsession with the master's phallus turns out to be illusory. There are more references to the slave's arse. (Not to mention his mouth and throat.)

The phallus-as-firearm is, as it were, spiked by its need for a wound, a ‘hole’. It cannot act alone. (What stud could survive the ignominy of having as his phallus-master's only slave that other weapon, his clenched fist?) As a ‘self’ in isolation, it is impotent. So when, in ‘Come All Ye Brave Boys’, Ginsberg addresses all the supposedly heterosexual youths sunning themselves on upper Broadway, with the intention of teaching them ‘a new tenderness’ and ‘new joys’, he is careful not to repeat the welcoming servility of ‘Please Master’. In effect, he offers them all a way out of their phallic impasse: firstly, by calling on them to ‘Turn over spread your strong legs like a lass’ so as to be ‘jived up the ass;’¹⁹ and secondly, by inviting them to join him in a session of embraces which will involve not just their phallic ‘automobiles’, but arms, heads, shoulders, brows, bellies, necks, anuses, penises, lips, tongues, armpits, breasts, and legs (CP, p. 637). He dares them to taste for the first time the pleasures, not only of his, but of their own flesh. If they take his advice, these boys, who are now just ‘tight assed & strong cocked young fools’, will have the opportunity of becoming complete creatures, their wayward parts unified by joy. Ginsberg (or his poem) will introduce them to themselves.

The phallus may be isolated, as a fetish; but its allure need not be merely solipsistic, self-referential. The male Diana of Ephesus, ‘born with genitals all over / his body’, would bristle with erections when aroused, like a mirror-image of Saint Sebastian: a body clad in gentle arrows, all pointing outwards. Like Diana's, his physique will give suck at any point. In effect, this image is an expression of the ordinary body, any part of which has potential as an erogenous zone, no less productive of pleasure than the genital zone itself. To sleep with a man who has allowed himself to develop this full physical potential is, therefore, equivalent to sleeping with a whole crowd of phallocentric studs. The multi-penised man, paradoxically, invites one to partake of erotic pleasures beyond the dominance of the phallus: he attacks our obsession with the groin. After fucking and ejaculation, there is intercourse.

Notes

1. See, for instance, the following: James Dickey, ‘Allen Ginsberg’, Babel to Byzantium (N.Y., 1973) pp. 52-5. Gerrit Henry, ‘Starting from Scratch’, Poetry 124 (May 1974) pp. 292-9. Richard Howard, ‘Allen Ginsberg’, Alone with America (London, 1970) pp. 145-52. James F. Mersmann, ‘Allen Ginsberg: Breaking Out’, Out of the Vietnam Vortex (Lawrence, Kansas, 1974) pp. 31-75. (But Mersmann does refer to Ginsberg's homosexuality on p. 164, in an essay on Robert Duncan.) Geoffrey Thurley, ‘Allen Ginsberg: The Whole Man In’, The American Moment (London, 1977) pp. 172-86. Diana Trilling, ‘The Other Night at Columbia: A Report from the Academy’, Partisan Review 26, 2 (Spring 1959) pp. 214-30. A. Kingsley Weatherhead, The Edge of the Image (Seattle, 1967), of which pp. 186-96 are on Ginsberg.

2. See, for instance, the following: Frederick Eckman, ‘Neither Tame Nor Fleecy’, Poetry 90, 6 (Sept. 1957), pp. 386-97, of which pp. 391-3 review Howl: Eckman refers to homosexuality obliquely, once in a quotation from Stanley Kunitz (p. 391), and once by quoting, without comment, Ginsberg's portrayal of Whitman, eyeing up grocery boys in a supermarket. Ihab Hassan, ‘Allen Ginsberg’, Contemporary American Literature 1945-1972 (N.Y., 1973) pp. 102-4: Hassan says Ginsberg learned about homosexuality, drugs, insanity, and other subjects during his youth, but does not suggest that this knowledge was of a practical sort, nor that it has had much lasting weight (p. 103). Steven Stepanchev, ‘Popular Poetry: Allen Ginsberg’, American Poetry Since 1945 (N.Y., 1965), pp. 166-74; Stepanchev cites Ginsberg's putting his ‘queer shoulder’ to the wheel, and his bisexual foray into a bridal bed, both without comment. Other writers mention Ginsberg's homosexuality, but make no attempt to go beyond mere mention by examining its significance. See, for instance: Thomas F. Merrill, Allen Ginsberg (N.Y., 1969), which has glancing references on pp. 19, 85, and 136 twice. Eric Mottram, Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties (Brighton & Seattle, 1972), with one reference on p. 22.

3. Leslie Fiedler, Waiting for the End (London, 1965) p. 242.

4. Paul O'Neil, ‘The Only Rebellion Around,’ in Thomas Parkinson, ed., A Casebook on the Beat (N.Y., 1961) p. 238.

5. There are important references to Rimbaud in ‘Car Crash’, ‘Ignu’, ‘Manifesto’, ‘Memory Gardens’, and ‘Pertussin’; to Crane in ‘Cleveland, the Flats’, ‘Death to Van Gogh's Ear’, and ‘Kansas City to Saint Louis’; and to Whitman in ‘Love Poem on Theme by Whitman’, ‘A Supermarket in California’, and on the dedicatory page of The Fall of America. Ginsberg has established, as a kind of Apostolic succession, his own homosexual descent from Whitman, by pointing out that he (Ginsberg) slept with Neal Cassady, who slept with Gavin Arthur, who slept with Edward Carpenter, who slept with Walt Whitman himself. Which is, as Ginsberg comments, ‘an interesting sort of thing to have as part of the mythology’—Leyland, pp. 106-7, 126-8. A similar theme was taken up in the play Only Connect, by Noel Greig and the late Drew Griffiths of London's Gay Sweatshop collective. The play was broadcast by BBC TV on 18 May 1979.

6. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947-1980 (Harmondsworth, 1985) pp. 126-33. Hereafter, page references to this edition will appear in parentheses in the body of my text, with the abbreviation CP.

7. Winston Leyland, ed., Gay Sunshine Interviews I (San Francisco, 1978) pp. 95-128, where Ginsberg is interviewed by Allen Young.

8. Fiedler, p. 248. According to J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (London, 1970) pp. 151-2, ‘Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of L. B. Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance—the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (J. F. K., Krushchev) or uncircumcised (L. B. J., Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan's face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection.’

9. In the Gay Sunshine interview, Ginsberg explains his deportation from Cuba, as follows: ‘Well, the worst thing I said was that I'd heard, by rumor, that Raúl Castro was gay. And the second worst thing I said was that Che Guevara was cute’ (p. 113). While reaffirming his faith in the positive aspects of the Cuban revolution, Ginsberg goes on to criticise Castro's heavy-handed treatment of homosexuality, and the revolutionary establishment's tendency to denounce its political enemies as ‘fairies’ (pp. 113-17).

10. Example: ‘On one occasion in London, I was all but seduced by a very attractive policeman who came into the toilet at Shepherd's Bush dressed in black leather and started masturbating, his handcuffs at the ready to catch the queens.’ Mario Mieli, Homosexuality and Liberation (London, 1980) pp. 101-2.

11. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (London, 1968) pp. 38, 244, 271.

12. Fred Halstead, Out Now! A Participant's Account of the American Movement against the Vietnam War (N.Y., 1978) pp. 611-12.

13. Halstead, p. 613.

14. Mersmann, p. 225.

15. Jane Kramer, Paterfamilias: Allen Ginsberg in America (London, 1970) p. 95.

16. Halstead, p. 204.

17. Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals March 1962-May 1963 (San Francisco, 1970), p. 1. CP, pp. 352, 553.

18. Rictor Norton describes how, in Renaissance love poems, the relationship concerned is often a ‘slightly homoerotic’ threesome, involving a man, a woman and Cupid. Norton continues: ‘In one passage of Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love (1582), we find the lover, his mistress, and Cupid all in bed together: if this is merely a conventional way of saying that a man loved a maid, then the convention has certainly gotten out of hand.’ The Homosexual Literary Tradition (N.Y., 1974) pp. 259-60. Ginsberg's version of this loving intervention between bride and groom is, according to his Gay Sunshine interview (p. 103), a fantasy about making love with Neal Cassady and his wife.

19. Mieli, p. 138: ‘The demand for the restoration of anal pleasure is one of the basic elements in the critique made by the gay movement of the hypostatising of the heterosexual-genital status quo by the dominant ideology.’ Mieli, p. 140: ‘As a general rule, the more fear a man has of being fucked, the more he himself fucks badly, with scant consideration for the other person, who is reduced to a mere hole, a receptacle for his blind phallic egoism.’