Abstract
The Beats were notorious nonconformist postmodernists who sought what seemed in their heyday (1950–1969) to be a distinctly non-American form of self-fulfillment, which they proposed might come from alternative ways of being: perpetual travelers, spiritualists, or literary experimentalists. Much of this notoriety for the wider public, however, does not originate from the Beats’ nuanced philosophy of being; instead it comes from myths about their sexual behaviors and from the treatment of sexuality in their works. For a start, the Beats rose to fame through two obscenity charges that took issue with the treatment of sexual content in their works: these were the prosecutions of two seminal Beat texts, Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956) and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), the trials of which concluded that the literary merit of the works outweighed any offense that might be caused through their content. Nevertheless, Beat writing is often seen exclusively as propounding sexual experimentation, a precedent of the sexual revolutions of free love that ensued in the 1960s, whether expressed in Ginsberg's explicit references to homosexuality or Jack Kerouac's tendency to give his principal characters multiple sexual partners. Adding significantly to the myth of the Beats as exponents of free love and casual sex is Diane di Prima's widely read Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), a semifictional memoir about the author's involvement with well-known figures from Beat circles, written as pornography for money in the 1960s. Perhaps one of the most well-known instances of Beat Generation history is a scene from that book in which the author-protagonist has an orgy with a group of people that includes Ginsberg and Kerouac. Memoirs of a Beatnik seems to confirm that the Beats were indeed experimenting with sexual behaviors of all kinds; to the most conservative members of the public, the book paints these writers as lacking a sense of sexual morality in what appears an outright rejection of fidelity and monogamy. Yet, at the same time, Memoirs of a Beatnik is an excellent example of the Beats’ treatment of sexuality: for Beats like Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, di Prima, and many others whom I discuss below, one's sexual preferences do not point to one's ethical choices; rather, sexuality is celebrated as a fluid concept tied always to political or social commentary.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Cambridge Companion to the Beats |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 179-192 |
Number of pages | 14 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781316877067 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781107184459 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2017 |