In 1985 Allen Ginsberg sat down his friend, a 17-year-old gay boy named Peter Hale, and gave some advice: “Get a wife, settle down, and have kids.” At that time, Hale was enrolled in a summer program Naropa UniversityA Buddhist-inspired college where the 59-year-old Ginsburg ran a writing program.
“He told me not to live the life of a wandering poet with a broken heart and forever incomplete,” Hale told me via video call. In Hale’s words, Ginsburg was “too much of a traditionalist”.
This is a surprisingly conservative image of the poet, a Beat libertine who, along with writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, broke new ground for post-war American literature, popularized Buddhism in the West, and scandalized the polite society of the time with Howl, his 1956 poem that resulted in a landmark obscenity trial. He lived his life exactly as he had warned against: a gay “wandering poet”. He toured with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, he was referred to as “”immoral threat” by the Czechoslovakian government in 1965 and expelled from the country and immortalized in Kerouac’s novels On the Road and The Dharma Bums. All of this created the Ginsberg mythos: the sandaled guru, the hippie before there was a hippie.
On our call, Hale speaks about the poet with the same reverence I’ve felt as a fellow gay writer since my teens, when I first read the book Howl and Other Poems, Slim City Lights, whose iconic black-and-white cover can still be found in any worthwhile book store.
“I met him right after I did the project with the Clash, where He was in the Combat Rock album“He was always showing up at punk shows and things,” says Hale, adding that Ginsburg never got sober in his later years. “He was always involved, even from the ’90s until a few years before he died. He’d be going to San Francisco to make introductions for someone, or he’d be part of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to shake things up a bit and inspire more radical writers. He was always there, finger in the beehive.”
Our call approaches the centennial of Ginsburg’s birth on June 3, and the occasion is being marked by a September vinyl Reissue of the poet’s historic 1959 spoken-word album. As well as Howell’s live reading, the release also includes renditions of America, A Supermarket in California, Caddish and other poems. The centenary program also includes a Evening An exhibition will be held at London’s Southbank Center this month Stanford Universityand new york events This fall features Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith.
When Hale met Ginsberg, the young man was more curious about Ginsberg’s fellow Beat writer William S. Burroughs. Hale arrived at Burroughs’s apartment one morning after a party, hoping to meet the author, and simply missed him. Instead, he found Ginsburg mopping the floor. Hale says they talked for “hours” about Buddhism and meditation, and when Hale confessed that he was not well read, Ginsberg wrote a reading list of Whitman, Rimbaud, Pound, Faulkner, Kerouac, Burroughs, as well as two of his own poems.
Hale says his life changed that day. Years later, he worked cataloging photo contact sheets in Ginsburg’s New York offices, an apprenticeship that ended after Ginsburg’s death, and has been running the Ginsburg estate ever since.
A century is a celebration, but if it’s honest, it’s also an examination, so I had to ask Hale about the thorniest part of Ginsburg’s legacy, the one she calls “a headache”: Ginsburg’s association, in the late 1970s and beyond, with North American Man/Boy Love Association (Nambala), a highly controversial group founded in 1978, which campaigned to abolish age of consent laws and “end the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consenting relationships”, according to its site (the group remains active).
Hale says that Ginsburg saw her support as just another protest against state policing of debate and ideas, but it forever tarnished Ginsburg’s legacy.
“Alan was incredibly naive to think this was really a free speech thing,” Hale told me. At the time, he says, “All you had to do was say someone was a member and the FBI could put you up. There were so many occult incidents going on at the time that it caught Alan’s attention.”
Hale argues that Ginsburg had less faith in the organization’s purpose but was instead opposed to censoring it. Almost from its inception, Nambla was rejected by the organized gay rights movement, was investigated by the FBI, and was decriminalized in 1994. formally expelled From the International Lesbian and Gay Association.
Ginsburg himself has argued the free-speech angle in an essay, Thoughts on Nambala, in the posthumous collection Deliberate Prose, where he writes that he joined “as a matter of civil liberties” in response to the FBI campaign of entrapment and “dirty tricks”, which he compared to the Bureau’s earlier targeting of black and anti-war activists. He described Nambala as “a forum for reforming laws on youth sexuality that members consider repressive, a discussion society, not a sex club”.
The truth is even murkier. As stated by Beat scholar David S. Wills documentsThe essay’s concluding reference to “consensual inter-generational affection and affairs” reads somewhat like a defense of relationships, not just the right to discuss them: Ginsburg writes that “people like me do not make physical love to childless boys and girls”, and her support of Nambala “should not be distorted into an apology for the rape and mental or physical violation of children”. People close to Ginsberg, including his friend and archivist Bill Morgan, have described him as naive about the organization and its members’ advocacy, but Hale says the poet saw it with clear eyes. “He said it was probably a mistake,” he said. “He certainly told a lot of people that.”
Elsewhere, Ginsburg seems less remorseful. In 1994 a lawyer ArticleThree years before his death, he defended Nambala, saying it was “an innocent little organization about people who want to talk about their inclinations, their eros, which is aimed at young people. It’s not always sexual. It’s quite harmless.” That same year, he appeared in the documentary Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love BoysIn which Nambla members defend it; On the video, Ginsberg read a poem titled Sweet Boy, Gimme Yer Ass (from Mind Breathes: Poems 1972–1977), which ends on the line “Have you ever slept with a man before?”
Wills writes that Ginsburg’s attraction to younger men was widely known. Very young? In 1994, Ginsberg reported Rocky Mountain News That “anyone above puberty is fine as long as it’s consensual and no one complains.”
Complicating matters is that Ginsburg was a gay man during decades when anti-gay activists routinely conflated homosexuality with pedophilia. Wills says that Kerouac writes widely about stalking young girls, but does not receive the same condemnation: “When Kerouac talks about being sexually attracted to ‘girls’ we do not believe that Kerouac was raping girls.”
Was this a pure provocation? Many believe that Ginsburg “hated” political correctness; Today, we might call him a trash-talker, someone who likes to tease. His friend Bob Rosenthal remembered Ginsburg. Saying: “Finally, I found an organization that is completely indefensible!” The poet spent much of his career associating himself with society’s outcasts, from communists to drug users and sex workers. But other voices, such as feminist critic Andrea Dworkin, Call him an abuser and a pedophile. Whatever his private behavior, he has for decades publicly supported an organization that supports underage sex.
I tell Hale that all this is contradictory to me as someone who loved Ginsberg’s work. I’ve tried to look at his support for Nambala through the lens of his time and specifically in the context of gay culture, but it’s disappointing. My favorite mentors in life were older men who offered guidance when I needed it as a young adult, and some of those relationships involved consensual sex. I’m grateful for the kind, well-intentioned, older gay men in my life who gave me their versions of Ginsberg’s reading lists, taught me my history, and supported me when I tested positive for HIV. But I have also seen firsthand this dynamic weaponized and bent toward abuse, which Gay and bi men experience it at higher rates than heterosexual men.
Ginsburg is not the first queer celebrity to be embroiled in the debate over age of consent laws. In the early 1970s, before co-founding Nambla, David Thorstad was president of the Gay Activists Alliance in New York, and in 1977 founded the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Activist Harry Hay and feminist critic Camille Paglia publicly supported the organization. In France, queer intellectuals including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and gay liberation activist Guy Hocquenghem Signed petitions in 1977 Call for the decriminalization of sex between adults and minors.
Regardless, Hale shows no signs of Ginsburg being interested in slowing down. “People keep discovering his work,” he says. “People are still studying Ginsberg in school.” He believes that writing still has the same power as it has always had. Ultimately, he says, that’s what the century is about.
He points to a later work that still sounds fresh: Ballad of the Skeletons, a politically charged 1995 poem Ginsberg read to Paul McCartney, who was on guitar for the live reading, before the two recorded it for Mercury Records with Philip Glass on piano. In 1996, Gus Van Sant turned it into a music video. This, Ginsberg’s last major work, shows perhaps his best side: an artist artist, a protest poet who united and inspired the best minds of his generation.
Ginsberg remained unknown until the end: on April 5, 1997, he was dying of liver cancer at a gathering of friends in his Lower East Side apartment. Ginsberg’s Buddhist teacher Gelek Rinpoche gave Hale a brown pill and told him to give it to Ginsberg “after the last breath has passed from his body.” Hale, spoon in hand, stood at the bedside, next to Patti Smith, the hospice nurse, and others, and at 2:23 p.m. she placed it on Ginsburg’s lips.
I ask what was in the pill.
“no idea!” Hale says. “Chances were it was a mixture of herbs and yak dung. Everyone has a theory. But it was probably just some herbs. Some herbs and some prayers.”
