Was jack kerouac gay
Relax, Man
The Gay Like Letters of
Neal Cassady to Allen Ginsberg
Excerpts from My Dear Boy: Lgbtq+ Love Letters through the Centuries, Edited by Rictor Norton
To sum up the gay "line of succession," Walt Whitman slept with Edward Carpenter, who slept with Gavin Arthur (1901–72), who slept with Neal Cassady, who slept with Allen Ginsberg (born 1926) – the current reigning queen, who generously shared the mantle of gay poetry among the Pound Generation in the 1950s. Ginsberg's superb poem Howl (1956) was one of the most shocking poems of that generation – "I saw the finest minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix" – but also one of the most liberating, a watershed for lgbtq+ liberation – "who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, / who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with delight . . . ." By the 1960s Ginsberg was preoccup Jack Kerouac is typically remembered as the author of On the Road, the quintessential Pound Generation novel. Fancy most of Kerouac's work, it was autobiographical, drawn from his own existence experience and given rhythm and hue by the personalities and adventures he'd experienced along the way. Unlike in his first novel, The Town and the City, (in which Kerouac had invented elaborate characters and plots, only loosely inspired by real life events), when he finally sat down to create the published version of On The Road, Kerouac decided to thoroughly immerse the reader in the genuine events and characters he'd experienced exploring the highways and alleys of America with pal Neal Cassady. This idea of simply putting the grit of real life down as fiction was one he borrowed from writer acquaintance John Clellon Holmes. But the approach of On the Road was pure Jack—or depending on how you glance at it, pure Neal Cassady. For it was the careening, confessional, jazz-like prose of letters received from Cassady that Jack adapted for writing On the Road. Jack had met Cas It’s not hyperbole to say that the Overcome Generation – a small coterie of writers who met up in New York City in the spring of 1944 – changed the world. Without their individual quests for personal freedoms – a quest for sex and drugs before there was rock and roll; a quest which spawned the western world’s first counter-culture, the beatniks – the hippy movement of the Sixties would never have happened, and punk would have been a quiet snarl rather than a global reaction. Of all the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac, author of the autobiographical beatnik bible, On the Road, is unequivocally the most renowned. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, to working class French-Canadian parents, Kerouac aspired to be a writer from a youthful age, though he was also a keen football player. Indeed, it was a football scholarship to Columbia University which initially drew him to New York, where he first met the young poet and visionary Allen Ginsberg, heroin adJack Kerouac
1922-1969
Jack Kerouac was recognizable for his willingness to sleep with anything, though he preferred to stay off various women while writing his novels. The story of Kerouac and the writer Gore Vidal hooking up in the Village in 1953 is a legend that is off the literary radar. Vidal has been boasting about the event for the last three or four decades, but the poet Allen Ginsberg denied that his friend and Vidal ever had intercourse. Here is the story:
Gore Vidal first met Jack Kerouac in 1949 at the Metropolitan Opera when Kerouac was on the cusp of publishing his first novel, The Town and the City, and Vidal had just published The City and the Pillar with its controversial and explicit depictions of gay sex. According to Vidal, Kerouac was with his publisher from Harcourt Brace, a man who Vidal claimed had paid both Kerouac and Neal Cassady for sex. Vidal and Kerouac flirted, but nothing happened.
Things were different the next period they met on August 23, 1953. “As everybody knows, I fucked Kerouac,” said Vidal in a 1994 interview. “He rang me and said, ‘I got
The long-awaited film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel presents the perfect opportunity to re-examine the lives of the Beat Generation, writes Richard Watts.