Queer beats - Regina Marler

Blasting through the crew-cuts and conformism of their day, the Beat writers were queer in the fullest sense of the word - their fluid sexuality challenged all sexual and romantic conventions. Most shocking of their unconventional attitudes was their embrace of same-sex eroticism. At a time when gay people were considered mentally ill or criminal, the Beats celebrated spontaneity and freedom in thought, word and action. Their highest value was nakedness - even before Allen Ginsberg stripped bare at a poetry reading to silence a heckler. They would try anything once, then write about itQUEER BEATS: HOW THE BEATS TURNED AMERICA ON TO SEX traces, for the first time, the queer pulse that throbs throughout the Beats' writings - from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg's wistful, boy-loving sex poems to Jack Kerouac's hero-worship of Neal Cassady - and Kerouac's denial of having sex with men, despite erotic encounters with Ginsberg and Gore Vidal: "Posterity will laugh at me if it thinks I was queer."