Intro
Beware: the Beats are coming, the Beats are coming. The Beat Generation will shatter all of the rules, leaving society's bits and pieces scattered on the ground of history. Things are about to get a bit ugly.
Influenced heavily by Surrealism and the Modernist works of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg and his Beat colleagues really shook things up. They cast out Modernism and laid the groundwork for what we now call Post-Modernism, creating their own little category of literature that's wedged in between those two Goliath-like movements.
So, Beat Literature is really a transitional style that throws the traditional rules of careful narration and masculinist, heterosexist perspectives out the window. Then it lets other authors clean up the mess.
In the early '90s—thirty-five years after "Howl" was published—queer theory had finally gained enough political and intellectual power to start making something out of the disturbance Ginsberg initiated.
The term beat refers to a person who's down-beaten, or beaten up; someone who's been pushed around by normative culture and has had just about enough of all that. This idea resonates strongly with queer theorists and all people who live at society's margins.
You beat me and I'll beat back, eh? While language can be a weapon to hold people down, it can also be used to lift people up. The Beat Generation pushed back against an oppressive society with raucous irreverence. They wrote to the beat of a different drummer, like queer theory thinks to the beat of a different drummer.
And for once, it's not just house music and disco…
Quote
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in police cars
for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be f***ed in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever come who may,
who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
Analysis
Pardon me America while I offend everyone for a moment. Ginsberg uses "alternative" sex acts as a social critique in this poem. There are people sexually expressing themselves with "saintly motorcyclists"(hell's angels?), in "rose gardens" (ouch), on "the grass of public parks" (grass stains are very hard to get out of khakis), and in "cemeteries" (no comment).
None of that sounds comfortable. But it all does definitely challenge the way we think and talk about sex in our culture, and how that relates to broader power dynamics between people. Like, why are sex acts between men seemingly more "racy" than missionary sex between a guy and a gal?
Both Lee Edelman and Ginsberg are critics of capitalism and the dominant social orders of their day. Writing about "abnormal" sexuality is a tool these authors use to break down the social orders that do damage to bodies that are not "normal." Can't we just get a room like everyone else?
No. Because being put in the closet, being told to stay silent, is what allows white, straight, rich men to define what's "normal" in the first place.
And why speak with a potty-mouth? When Edelman uses the f-word, like Ginsberg, he does it to awaken us to the power of cultural taboos. These two authors' work seems to beg the question: Why do we make such a fuss over four-letter words? Who gets to decide what words are "bad words" anyway?
Using expletives is a very Beat-like technique. Both Beat poets and queer theorists ask the reader to examine just how far they can deviate from people's expectations for discussing sexuality. And one clear cultural expectation is: be polite. Don't talk about nasty things.
Their response? Treat me, a queer man, like a human being or I will beat you with this f-word. When we read about men "…scattering their semen freely," that's shocking. Sure. But this is also a metaphor for confrontation that must be as forceful as the dominant social order is unbreakable.
The disturbing language of Ginsberg meets an oppressive society with as much force as it can muster because he's tired of being treated as "less than." Edelman's version of queer theory uses a similar tactic.
In Edelman's work, the child has become a monster. Think about Chucky or the brats from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The social order of the Child, as Edelman describes it, is part of the same order that oppressed the "greatest minds" of Ginsberg's generation.
Edelman takes the fight to procreation and the cult of the Child, like a modern day Willy Wonka. We want nice honest kids, not mean and demanding kids with crappy parents that eat too much and want to control the world. Sometimes mean and nasty things need a good talking to, don't you think?
Like Lee Edelman's queer theory, Allen Ginsberg's poetry met the bodily violence done to queer people of his generation, gay and straight alike, with the violence of language. Ginsberg writes of peers "who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in police cars."
Sometimes change ain't pretty. Sometimes, it's even painful. Ginsberg's "Howl" is that wild call heard by oppressed people when they've had enough of someone always telling them they're not wanted. That their voices should stay silent.
Allen Ginsberg and Lee Edelman may not have been writing in the same era, but Ginsberg busted open that closet door for Edelman to blaze through. And they won't be makin' any apologies.