Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  Howl and Other Poems appeared in September 1956 from City Lights Books with an introduction by William Carlos Williams. It was dedicated to Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Lucian Carr. The first printing was a thousand copies. The booklet was fifty-seven pages and cost seventy-five cents.

  Richard Eberhart almost immediately discussed the title poem in the New York Times Book Review in an article about the new California poets. “Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love.” After that, however, reviews trickled in slowly. John Hollander in Partisan Review found the book “a dreadful little volume.” James Dickey, who later made anal rape the sin of sins in his novel Deliverance, dismissed the poem in the Sewanee Review as a meaningless diatribe “really not worth examining.” Ginsberg heard that his old teacher, Trilling, found it dull and that Ezra Pound disliked it. (Williams had sent Pound a copy, and Pound wrote back that he shouldn’t waste people’s time by making them read “wot they dont know”—his gnarled way of saying that he didn’t want to read about homosexuals. He wrote from his cell at St. Elizabeths Hospital where he had been incarcerated since being declared insane for his fascist radio broadcasts during the war. More than one poet went to the madhouse in the 1950s.) Norman Podhoretz in the New Republic used the poem to attack the Beat Generation for using “homosexuality, jazz, dope-addiction and vagrancy” to rebel for no purpose except to rebel. But the gay material did not elicit the overt disgust it had nine years earlier in novels by Vidal and Capote. Perhaps readers of poetry were more sophisticated, or maybe they were simply less honest: many critics called the poem boring.

  Yet the little book continued to sell and gather attention during its first year after publication. It attracted interest not only for itself, but also as a part of a wider social phenomena: the arrival of the Beats. On the Road was finally published in September 1957, with a glowing review in the New York Times. A few weeks earlier, making the poem more visible than ever, Howl and Other Poems went on trial in San Francisco for obscenity.

  The first signs of legal trouble appeared back in March, when U.S. Customs seized 520 copies of the second printing. Ferlinghetti was having the book produced in Britain. The customs agents found objectionable not just the use of words like cock and balls but the phrase “who let themselves be…… in the… by saintly motorcyclists.” At the insistence of their British printer, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg put the poem’s most provocative line into what looked like Morse code—and it still offended people.

  Ferlinghetti outmaneuvered customs by having the next printing of 2,500 copies done in the United States. The San Francisco newspapers supported Ferlinghetti and found the authorities absurd. At the end of May, the seized books were released when the U.S. attorney general decided not to press charges. But a few days later, two San Francisco detectives from the Juvenile Bureau walked into City Lights Bookshop, bought a copy of Howl, departed, read it, then returned and arrested the store clerk, Shigeyoshi Murao, for selling lewd and obscene material. Ferlinghetti was out of town, but surrendered to the police when he returned.

  The author himself was not charged. Besides, he was on the other side of the Atlantic. Like every other American writer of the twentieth century, Ginsberg had gone abroad. He and Orlovsky left in April, never dreaming that events would take such a wild turn. He stayed in touch with Ferlinghetti as well as he could, first from Morocco, then from Italy.

  The trial began August 16, presided over by Judge Clayton Horn. The defense attorney, Jake Erlich, supported by two lawyers from the ACLU, decided to waive trial by jury and present the case solely to a judge, even though this judge taught Sunday school and had recently sentenced five shoplifters to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s new Biblical epic, The Ten Commandments.

  From the start, the trial was followed closely by the press and attended by a capacity crowd. The San Francisco Chronicle reported an audience wearing a “fantastic collection of beards, turtlenecked shirts and Italian hairdos.” Judge Horn laid down strict ground rules: the defense and prosecution could discuss the value of the book but not if it were obscene or not. That would be his determination. He also said no witnesses would be allowed to speculate on what the author meant to put in the sets of Morse code dots.

  The charge against Murao, the salesclerk, was quickly dropped. Only Ferlinghetti was on trial, but he was not called to testify. Instead the defense brought forward experts. Critic and teacher Mark Schorer testified that the poem, “like any work of literature, attempts and intends to make a significant comment on or interpretation of human experience” and that “the language of the street” was “essential to the aesthetic purpose of the work.” (He also claimed that the poet uses homosexuality as evidence of how corrupt the world had become.) Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of The Ox-Bow Incident, called “Howl” “the work of a thoroughly honest poet,” and Kenneth Rexroth said it “is probably the most remarkable single poem, published by a young man since the second war.” The only experts the prosecution offered were David Kirk, a professor who said the poem was worthless because it imitated Whitman, and Gail Potter, a teacher who had rewritten Faust and found reading Ginsberg’s figures of speech was like “going through the gutter.” The prosecutor, deputy district attorney Ralph McIntosh, focused his effort on his closing statements where he argued that literary merit was irrelevant if a book were obscene. He compared the poem to modern painting, which he found ridiculous, and said it must be judged by how it was perceived by “the average man,” not “the modern man.” This might have worked with a jury, but there was no jury.

  It was a very unusual, very artistic trial. Not only was there talk of Dada and surrealism, there were extensive quotations from the Book of Job, Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Johnson, and Ginsberg’s own “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.”

  Judge Horn deliberated for two weeks, using the time to read Ulysses as well as Judge John Woolsey’s 1933 judgment freeing the James Joyce novel for publication. Horn gave his decision on October 3. The first half is a clear, cool description of the poem and its themes—a very smart piece of literary criticism, not at all what one expects from a federal judge. The second half builds to twelve rules on what makes a book obscene or not. Horn drew upon the Supreme Court’s recent Roth v. United States decision, but added his own touches. The first rule is that material with any redeeming social importance is not obscene. The fourth is that a book must be judged by its effect as a whole on the average adult reader. The twelfth is that one should never charge a book with being obscene without consideration of one’s own point of view: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” (Evil to him who thinks evil.) He closed with, “Therefore, I conclude the book Howl and Other Poems does have some redeeming social importance, and I find the book is not obscene. The defendant is found not guilty.”

  The trial was reported in several national newspapers, Life magazine, and Saturday Review. Articles in Time and Esquire followed. Sales of Howl skyrocketed. No other first book of poems has ever received this kind of national attention. Before the end of the year, 10,000 copies were sold. The court case would be cited later when commercial houses decided to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

  Ginsberg was in Venice when the trial began. He alternated between hope and fear, worrying Ferlinghetti would lose money if they lost, then in his next letter asking if Ferlinghetti could reinstate the missing words if they won. He went down to Rome for a magazine interview and continued south to meet W. H. Auden. He joined the older man and his friends at an outdoor café on the island of Ischia. Auden talked about Howl, which he had read and disliked, then about Shelley and Whitman, whom he didn’t like either. Ginsberg wrote about the meeting in a letter to his father:

  I quoted the first line of Whitman, “I celebrate myself,” and Auden said, “O but my dear, that’s so wrong and so shameless; it’s an utterly bad line—when I hear that I feel I must say please don’t include me”… I tackled the whole tabl
e on the Whitman issue & wound up tipsy calling them a bunch of shits—Auden seems to have a longwinded rationalistic approach to his opinions—I doubt he respects his own feelings anymore—I think his long sexual history has been relatively unfortunate and made him very orthodox and conservative and merciless in an offhand way—he sounds like an intelligent Time magazine talking.

  Auden was a man of many moods, and it’s a pity Ginsberg didn’t meet him in a more generous one. In his next letter to his father, Ginsberg enclosed a sprig of clover plucked from Shelley’s grave in Rome.

  He was in Amsterdam when he finally heard that they had won the case. “Natch was glad and thankful,” he wrote Ferlinghetti. He hoped they could continue the battle and free the work of Henry Miller, Jean Genet, and others for publication. And then, like any nice person, he asked, “Is there anyone I should write thank you notes to??”

  The missing fucked and ass were reinstated in the seventh printing in 1959.

  Fifty years later, it’s remarkable how the gayness of both the poem and Ginsberg himself are often downplayed by admirers. Just as there are now books titled Queer Forster and Queer Burroughs, we need one called Queer Ginsberg to reconstitute the man in his full homosexual nakedness. A fiftieth anniversary collection of essays about Howl included only one gay male contributor, Mark Doty. Neither of Ginsberg’s major biographies mentions his visit to the Stonewall Inn after the 1969 riots, as if afraid to tie him to anything as narrow as gay liberation. The literary mainstream prefers to see homosexual artists as isolated rebels or criminals, not as members of another tribe.

  Yet after Howl, Ginsberg never denied the importance of his gay self. When people at readings asked why there were so many references to homosexuality in the poem, he blithely told them, “Because I am a homosexual.” In his Who’s Who entry in 1963, he insisted on being described as “married” to Peter Orlovsky. Nor did he deny his bond with other gay artists. It’s at the core of his famous “whisperered transmission.” He had slept with Neal Cassady who had slept with Gavin Arthur who had slept with Edward Carpenter who had slept with Walt Whitman—the gay equivalent to the lists of begats in the Bible.

  In Gordon Ball’s famous 1991 photo of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute reading Howl and Other Poems, crewcut young men in gray uniforms frown into uniform copies of the black-and-white City Lights edition. What do they see there? What are they thinking? Is it just madhouse gibberish for them? Or does the sexuality tap into the wound-up energy buried in their stiff-backed bodies? Or are they worrying about those “saintly motorcyclists”?

  4. Soul Kiss

  Years later, in the new medium of television that would change so much about American culture, James Baldwin was asked by a British journalist how it felt starting as a writer when he was black, impoverished, and homosexual. “You must’ve thought to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’ ” Baldwin smiled. “No, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.” It was not just a smart joke, it was a brilliant judo move: he treated obstacles as golden opportunities. Yet those obstacles were also duties, a crushing set of obligations. Baldwin was often able to outplay them in his long career, but not always.

  He began his professional life by trying to escape the expectation that a minority writer must use his art for politics. One of his first major essays, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” was an attack on the very idea that great literature should be political. In his “Autobiographical Notes” to Notes of a Native Son, he argued: “I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.” But the gate never stayed unlocked for long, and he needed to unlock other gates as well.

  Critics often speak of Baldwin as a black writer who never lived up to the promise of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Yet the shape of his career looks very different when we speak of him as a gay writer.

  He was born in Harlem Hospital on August 2, 1924, James Arthur Jones, the illegitimate son of Emma Jones, a single woman who had just come north from Maryland. He never knew who his father was. His mother soon met and married a much older man, David Baldwin, a lay preacher and factory worker who gave the boy a new name. Seven more children followed. “As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book in the other,” Baldwin later wrote. “The children probably suffered, though they have been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over and over again.” His brothers and sisters would be important to him for the rest of his life.

  He was a remarkable-looking creature from an early age. Because of his wide mouth and enormous, heavy-lidded eyes, he was sometimes called “sandwich mouth” and “frog-eyes,” as was his mother—as are the mother and son in Go Tell It on the Mountain. But it was his intelligence that attracted the attention of his teachers. They encouraged him to attend school outside Harlem, and he commuted up to DeWitt High in the Bronx, one of the best schools in the city. There he worked on the literary magazine with future editor Sol Stein and future photographer Richard Avedon. Back home in Harlem he became a boy preacher at the local storefront church, following in his stepfather’s footsteps even as he fought and competed with that difficult, unhappy man. He continued to preach until he finished high school.

  Yet he was already exploring the rest of life: movies, jazz, art, and sex. New York City jumped with fresh opportunities during World War II. Baldwin met the painter Beauford Delaney, who was black and gay and lived downtown in Greenwich Village. Baldwin later described him as “a cross between Brer Rabbit and St. Francis.” Delaney played records by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith for the former boy preacher while he painted pictures of him, including a nude oil and an idealized portrait in pastels—the latter done to show a mutual acquaintance that Baldwin was beautiful if looked at in the right way. The forty-something Delaney was in love with the teenager, but the feeling was not reciprocated. Nevertheless, the two remained friends for the next thirty-some years. Young Baldwin was going to bed with both men and women, but he thought of himself as homosexual by the time he was twenty.

  He also thought of himself as a writer. He wrote poems and stories and began novels and plays. There was no money for college and he supported himself with a variety of jobs, including work at a defense plant in New Jersey where he was humiliated and driven away for being black. Meanwhile his aging stepfather deteriorated mentally and physically. The old man died in 1943, and his funeral was held on the day of a major race riot in Harlem. Shortly afterward, Baldwin began a novel about his family, In My Father’s House. He showed early chapters first to Delaney, who thought they were wonderful, and then to Richard Wright. There had been black novelists before Wright—Charles Chestnutt, Nella Larson, Jean Toomer—but none had received half the attention Wright did for his raw racial thriller, Native Son. The novel was published in 1941 and adapted into a Broadway play the following year. Wright read the young man’s chapters and recommended him for a literary grant. Baldwin was awarded five hundred dollars. He wrote more of the novel, now retitled Crying Holy, but was unable to sell it.

  He continued to work sweeping floors, operating elevators, and waiting tables, helping to support his mother and siblings as well as support himself. He lived in Greenwich Village, which wasn’t always easy. A white friend would sign a lease and Baldwin would move in; he was sometimes evicted when the switch was discovered. “There were very few black people in the Village in those years, and of that handful, I was decidedly the most improbable,” he wrote toward the end of his life. “But the queer—not yet gay—world was an even more intimidating area of this hall of mirrors. I knew that I was in the hall and present at this company—but the mirrors threw back only brief and distorted fragments of myself.” He found that guys who called him “faggot” when they were with their buddies on the street could be friendly and sweet when they encountered Baldwin alone. “I was far too terrifi
ed to accept their propositions, which could only result, it seemed to me, in making myself a candidate for gang rape. At the same time, I was moved by their loneliness, their halting, nearly speechless need.”

  He put his fiction aside and began a new career writing book reviews for various literary magazines. His first pieces showed a cool, bitter authority and were always critical. It didn’t matter if Baldwin were reviewing a white or black author—he even attacked the wife of W. E. B. DuBois—he found fault in everyone he read. There was a lot of anger in these early reviews, but Baldwin had much to be angry about.

  He burned to escape the United States after the war. When he won another grant, he used half the money to fly straight to Paris, a twelve-hour flight by plane in that pre-jet era, though it would’ve been much cheaper to travel by boat. He arrived in November 1948, a few months after Vidal, Capote, and Williams had departed. He brought the manuscript of Crying Holy with him, intending to finish it while he paid his way writing nonfiction for Partisan Review.

  On his first day in Paris he went to the famous literary café, Deux Magots, and met with Richard Wright, who had moved to France the previous year. Sitting with Wright was Themistocles Hoetis, a Greek-American novelist from Detroit who was starting a new magazine, Zero. He asked Baldwin to contribute.

  The first issue of Zero appeared that spring and included a short story by Wright and Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” This fierce attack on politics in fiction uses Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the prime example of how political righteousness reduces literature to one-note banalities. It’s hard to say what turned Baldwin against a book he once loved. He never really describes it—one wonders if he had a copy with him in Paris. He attacks the idea of the book, not the book itself, but the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel is richer and more complex than its reputation. Stranger still, Baldwin closes the essay with a jab at Native Son, treating his benefactor’s book as a sensational variation on Stowe’s sentimental theme. Wright confronted Baldwin about the essay at their next meeting. Baldwin insisted he wasn’t really attacking him and sat down and wrote a new piece, “Many Thousands Gone,” a long, cold, detailed criticism of Native Son that ended their friendship for good.