CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Sexual Politics of Allen Ginsberg 

Ginsberg with his partner, poet Peter Orlovsky, in 1978. Photo: Herbert Rusche. CC BY-SA 3.0

Here we are at the end of a month-long celebration of the life and work of the poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-2026) and I haven’t said a word about his sexual politics, which I described to a friend—who helped launch the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in New York—as “complex.” I know I can’t make up for what I didn’t say and this will definitely not be the last word on the subject. Far from it.

No one recently has written extensively about Ginsberg’s sexual politics, but about 15 years ago, the American writer Edmund White, a force in the LGBTQ community, noted that “Ginsberg bore the traces of the general homosexual oppression of his epoch, but he did more than anyone else of his generation to overcome his gay self-hatred and to take a pro-gay militant stand.” White added that “He was an apostle of tenderness among men.” Perhaps so, but not always as in poems like........

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