“Allen Ginsberg – A Prophet on the Electric Networks” in Lewis Hyde‘s 1984 collection,
On The Poetry of Allen Ginsberg ), Charley Shively, while admiring Allen, doesn’t let him off the hook:
“Allen Ginsberg is weak in his understanding of “sexism”. Many in the Women’s and Gay Movement would argue that the money nexus is less at the root of “the fall of America” than male supremacy. We would say that the madness for Cassady-Kerouac keeps the dollar floating as much as eating scab lettuce or smoking cigarettes. Much of the disrespect for women in Cassady and Kerouac has rubbed off onto Ginsberg (We’ll pass over the unkind things he says about “closet queens” and “teacup faggots”). In Ginsberg’s poetry and conversation women are always called “girls” and their names are seldom used. In the vast array of Beatdom, almost no reference is ever made to such poets as Diane di Prima or Lenore Kandel, and, although Allen’s entourage through the years has included many women, they (unlike the men) are seldom if ever named in the poems. The move to Vedic and Buddhist wisdom has often been a way of forestalling not facing the issues of sexual politics (e.g. Gary Snyder or Rennie Davis)..”
“This question of faggots and women as against the blue-eyed blonde stud such as Neal Cassady raises a hard question about the communal comradely love prophesied by Whitman and others The Fall of America is dedicated to Whitman and begins with a quotation from Democratic Vistas – “It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it) that I look for a counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.” Fine, but can everyone be included in this circle, or will it just be the beautiful young blonds? Will brunettes be in? Fat people? Bald people? Jews? Sioux? Faggots? The old? Children?. In celebrating so much adhesive love for the on-the-road companions, Ginsberg leaves someone like me outside (a faggot – and I drive just like a woman, as Kerouac pointed out about someone in derision in On The Road)
Similarly, he calls Allen out for what he sees as a naive nationalism:
“We must break ourselves of the habit of nation and nationhood. Those map lines were not drawn by the landscape, they were drawn across America by straight white men, agents of Western civilization… Celebrating “America” in “these states” is no good, not liberating – it perpetuates the nation-myth which is totally anti-people, anti-adhesive love, anti-amative love…Thinking in “national” categories perpetuates “these states” and prevents any real community from forming.”
Shively, though, holds his fire, at the end:
Ginsberg is imperfect, he’s human, he’s a man – that’s not news. Faggots shouldn’t let his “mistakes” go by without objection, but we must never forget, he is a poet. He is not just a cultural phenomenon, not just a prophet, not just a Beatnik, not just a liberator, not just a grand old man for us to play our fantasies on – he is a poet. And it’s no easier being a poet in these states than it is being a woman, or being a Cherokee, or being a faggot, or being black, or being anything that doesn’t fit the straight network. Poets haven more license to commit crimes than anyone else, but they should have a special claim to our love, understanding, help and (in Allen Ginsberg’s sense of the word) “prayers”.”
Charley’s interview with John Wieners in Gay Sunshine, March/April, 1973 (included in Raymond Foye‘s John Wieners Selected Poems 1958-1984 (1986) is an absolute must-read (Charley was always chagrined that the text didn’t indicate that it was conducted in the nude!)
Charley was, of course, responsible for the publication of the original edition of John’s
Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike (1975) via his Good Gay Poets collective and press (as well as Playboy (1972) and We were there!…a gay presence at the Democratic convention (1972). Excitingly, a new, 50th anniversary, edition of the book will be available from The Song Cave out soon (this coming November)
Michael Bronski‘s detailed and generous over-view of Charley’s life in The Boston Review -“The Last Gay Liberationist“ remains the most comprehensive testament and summary of an extraordinary life
See also his obituary notice in Beacon Broadside, some few months earlier
See also Jim Downs‘ enthused appreciation here for Slate
Downs as a Civil War historian and the author of Stand By Me – The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (2016) was an ideal reader for Charley, particularly for his two groundbreaking Gay Sunshine books, Drum Beats and Calamus Lovers
Ed Folsom, leading Walt Whitman scholar, too
“Many attendees of the 1992 Walt Whitman Centennial Conference at The University of Iowa vividly remember Shively standing up, during a question-and-answer period at a crowded plenary session, reading aloud Section 5 of “Song of Myself,” and then asking, “Now isn’t that cocksucking, pure and simple?” (Charley’s essay ““Cocksucking as an Act of Revolution” was a groundbreaking and pivotal document in the Gay Liberation movement)
“A poet, an activist, an editor, a scholar, a teacher, and a proud provocateur”, Folsom writes, “Charley Shively was one of a kind in Whitman Studies.”
Charley Shively, died Friday, October 6, 2017 at the Cambridge Rehabilitation and Nursing Home, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been a resident since June of 2011, suffering from Alzheimer’s.
A long-overdue and much-needed book of Charley’s poems (edited by Erik Lomen and Jim Dunn will be out (from Bootstrap Press) this summer.