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In 1985 Allen Ginsberg he sat down his 17-year-old friend, a gay man named Peter Hale, and offered advice: “Marry a wife, settle down, and have children.” At that time, Hale enrolled in a summer program at Naropa Universitythe Buddhist-inspired college where Ginsberg, 59, ran the writing program.
“He told me not to live the life of a broken, unfulfilled wandering poet,” Hale tells me via video. Ginsberg was, in Hale’s words, “very traditional”.
It is a wonderful picture of the poet, the Beat libertine himself, together with the writers. Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughshe pioneered a new way of reading American literature after the war, popularized Buddhism in the West and insulted the respectable public of the time with Howl, his 1956 horror poem that led to a blasphemy lawsuit. He lived his life as what he warned: a gay “traveling poet”. He walked with Bob DylanRolling Thunder Revue, was called “the threat of immorality” in 1965 by the Czechoslovak government and exiled from the country and died in Kerouac’s books On the Road and The Dharma Bums.
In our call, Hale speaks of the poet with the same respect I’ve had as a fellow gay writer since my teenage years, when I first read Howl and Other Poems, a small book about City Lights whose black-and-white cover can still be found in any major bookstore.
“I met him right after he did this project with the Clash, right was on the Combat Rock album,” says Hale. Ginsberg was inconsolable in his later years, he adds. “He was always involved, even into the ’90s, until a few years before he died. He would go to San Francisco to explain to someone, or he would be part of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to encourage more mature writers, to keep shaking things up a bit. He’s always in there, building a beehive.”
Our call coincides with Ginsberg’s centenary on June 3, and the occasion is marked by September’s vinyl release. a reissue of the famous 1959 poetry album. As well as a live reading of Howl, this release also includes his poems America, Supermarket in California, Kaddish and others. The centenary program also includes and in the evening at London’s Southbank Center this month, the show at Stanford Universityand New York events featuring Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith this fall.
When Hale met Ginsberg, the young man was eager to learn more about Ginsberg’s fellow Beat writer William S Burroughs. Hale came to Burroughs’ house one morning after a party, hoping to meet the writer, only to miss him. Instead, they found Ginsberg sweeping the floor. Hale is said to have talked for “hours” about Buddhism and meditation, and when Hale admitted that he was not well-read, Ginsberg wrote a reading list of Whitman, Rimbaud, Pound, Faulkner, Kerouac, Burroughs, and two of his own poems.
Hale says his life changed that day. A few years later, he worked in Ginsberg’s New York office writing contact papers, a course that ended when Ginsberg died, and has run Ginsberg’s estate ever since.
The centenary is a celebration, but if it is true, I will review it, so I have to ask Hale about the most difficult part of Ginsberg’s legacy, which he calls “the topic”: Ginsberg’s association, in the late 1970s and beyond, and North American Man/Boy Love Association (Nambla), a highly controversial group founded in 1978 that campaigned for the abolition of legal age laws and “to end the widespread oppression of men and boys in consensual relationships”, according to its website (the group is still active).
Hale says Ginsberg saw his support as another demonstration against the state police on arguments and ideas, but it tarnished Ginsberg’s legacy forever.
Hale told me: “Allen was too stupid to think it was a free story. At the time, he said: “All you had to do was say someone was a member of the group and the FBI could set you up.
Hale argues that Ginsberg was less of a believer in the cause of organization than an opponent of prohibition. Almost from its inception, Nambla was shunned by the gay rights movement, investigated by the FBI, and in 1994 legal expulsion from the International Lesbian and Gay Association.
Ginsberg opposes liberalism alone in Thoughts on Nambla, a posthumous essay in Deliberate Prose, in which he writes that he joined “as a human right” in response to the FBI’s crackdown and “fraudulent” campaign that he likens to what the agency sought to do with blacks and anti-war activists. He describes Nambla as “a forum to help reform laws on youth sexuality that members see as oppressive, a discussion group, not a sexist group”.
The truth is unpleasant. As Beat expert David S Wills is documentsthe article’s final words about “cross-generational romances” read a bit like a defense of those relationships, rather than a right to talk about them: Ginsberg writes that “people like me don’t make physical love to hairless boys and girls”, and that his support for Nambla “must not be twisted to apologize to children or insult them” or insult them. People close to Ginsberg, including his friend and author Bill Morgan, described him as ignorant of what the organization and its members advocated, but Hale says the poet saw it with clear eyes. “He said maybe it was a mistake,” he says. “He said this to several people.”
Elsewhere, Ginsberg seems unrepentant. In 1994 Advocate storythree years before his death, he defends Nambla as “an innocent little group about people who want to talk about their passions, their Eros, which affects young people. The same year, he appears in a documentary Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love Boyshow Nambla members protect it; in the video, Ginsberg reads a poem called Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass (from Mind Breaths: Poems 1972-1977) that ends with the line “ever slept with a man?”
Wills writes that Ginsberg’s appeal to young men was very popular. How young was he? Wills quoted Ginsberg as telling the Rocky Mountain News that “anyone who goes through puberty is fine as long as they get along and nobody complains,” although this cannot be proven; the newspaper ceased publication in 2009.
The problem is that Ginsberg was gay for many years while anti-gay critics confused homosexuality with paedophilia. Wills notes that Kerouac often writes about chasing young girls but doesn’t get the same criticism: “We don’t think Kerouac was raping girls when he talks about being attracted to ‘girls’.”
Was it to provoke anger? Many consider that Ginsberg “hated” political correctness; Today, we can call him a person who likes to mock. His friend Bob Rosenthal remembered Ginsberg to say: “Finally, I’ve found a group that can’t defend itself at all! The poet has spent much of his career collaborating with outsiders, from communists to drug users to prostitutes. But other words, like the feminist critic Andrea Dworkin, call him an abuser and a child sleeper. Regardless of his behavior, he spent many years accepting a society that promotes sex with young people.
I tell Hale that all of this contradicts me as a fan of Ginsberg’s work. I have tried to see his support for Nambla through the lens of his time and especially in terms of gay culture, but it is disappointing. The most beloved guides in my life were older men who gave me advice when I was growing up, and some of those relationships were casual sex. I am grateful for the kind, well-meaning, gay men in my life who gave me their own translations of Ginsberg’s essays, taught me my history, and helped me when I got tested for HIV. But I have also seen the beginnings of these weapons of war and leaning towards brutality, which Gay men face higher risks than heterosexual men.
Ginsberg is not the first commentator to be embroiled in controversy over age laws. In the early 1970s, before founding Nambla, David Thorstad was the president of the Gay Activists Alliance in New York, and in 1977 he founded the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Critic Harry Hay and feminist Camille Paglia publicly supported the movement. In France, intellectuals including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoirand gay rights activist Guy Hocquenghem signed the petition in 1977 calling for a ban on sex between adults and children.
Regardless, Hale sees no sign of interest in Ginsberg waning. He said: “People are still discovering his work. “People are still reading Ginsberg in school.” He believes the writing still has the power it always had. In the end, he says, this is what a century says.
He points to a later work still in existence: Ballad of the Skeletons, Ginsberg’s 1995 political poem read to Paul McCartneywho accompanied it on guitar for live readings before the duo recorded it at Mercury Records and Philip Glass on the piano. In 1996, Gus Van Sant they turned it into a music video. This, Ginsberg’s last major work, perhaps shows his best side: a talented artist, a critical poet who inspired and inspired the ideals of his generation.
Ginsberg remained unconscious until the end: on April 5, 1997, he lay dying of liver cancer in his Lower East Side apartment while friends gathered. Ginsberg’s Buddhist teacher, Gelek Rinpoche, gave Hale a brown pill and told him to give it to Ginsberg “when the last breath leaves his body.” Hale stood by the bed, spoon in hand, next to Patti Smith, a hospice nurse and others, and at 2:23 in the afternoon he pointed to Ginsberg’s lips.
I’m asking what was in the pills.
“No idea!” Hale says. “It was probably a mixture of herbs and sea faeces.
