NPR (Alison Stewart): One of the more controversial parts of his legacy is he was associated with NAMBLA, and he said he was supporting the group’s right to free speech. That association complicates his legacy for some people. What was the public response to it then or now?
IS: It’s deep gay history. The whole NAMBLA thing is one of these things that needs to be just chucked out the window, period. NAMBLA was an organization that was founded, granted, they had a pedophile agenda, they wanted to get rid of consent laws, but founded when the Boston police took down a pedophile ring who were gay. Gay equals pedophilia was seized upon by Anita Bryant, who’s one of the early anti-gay champions.
AS: Oh, gosh. Yes
IR: This is late ’70s. Pat Califia, who’s a major lesbian activist, and Harry Hay, who was really the founder of gay rights, Camille Paglia, all became members of NAMBLA to support the freedom of expression issues, because if you shut them down, you’re shutting down a conversation about gay rights and homosexuality. The NAMBLA association becomes this bugaboo. Allen didn’t like children. That’s the thing. When I was 19, yes, he hit on me, but I was sleeping with men who were of age when I was 15 and 16, going out in New York. The whole thing is he wasn’t a pedophile.
AS: Right. That’s why I said associations.
IR: Yes, exactly. His politics there got in the way, and I think he explained it to people. You can’t take down a subsection without taking everyone down with it. I think he was very clean about that.
and here’s Cheves’ discussion on the topic with Peter Hale, manager of the Ginsberg Estate:
“Hale says Ginsberg saw his support as just another protest against state policing of debate and ideas, but it tarnished Ginsberg’s legacy forever.
“Allen was incredibly naive to think it was a real free speech thing,” Hale tells me. At the time, he says, “All you had to do is say someone was a member and the FBI could set you up. There were so many of these witch-hunts happening at the time that it caught Allen’s eye.
Hale argues Ginsberg was less a believer in the organization’s cause than an opponent of censoring it. Almost from its inception, Nambla was rejected by the organized gay rights movement, investigated by the FBI, and in 1994 was formally expelled from the International Lesbian and Gay Association
Ginsberg argues the free-speech angle himself in “Thoughts on Nambla”, an essay in the posthumous collection Deliberate Prose, where he writes that he joined “as a matter of civil liberties” in response to an FBI campaign of entrapment and “dirty tricks” that he likened to the bureau’s earlier targeting of Black and anti-war activists. He describes Nambla as “a forum for reform of those laws on youthful sexuality which members deem oppressive, a discussion society, not a sex club..”
Cheves goes on:
“Complicating matters is that Ginsberg was an out gay person during decades when anti-gay activists routinely conflated homosexuality with paedophilia. (David S Wills) notes that Kerouac writes widely about chasing young girls but does not receive the same damnation: “We do not assume that Kerouac was raping female children when he talks about being sexually attracted to ‘girls’.”
“Was it pure provocation? Many observe that Ginsberg “hated” political correctness; today, we might call him a shit-kicker, someone who likes to rile. His friend Bob Rosenthal recalled Ginsberg saying: “At last, I’ve found an organisation which is totally indefensible!” The poet spent most of his career aligning himself with society’s outcasts, from communists to drug users to sex workers. But other voices, like the feminist critic Andrea Dworkin, call him an abuser and paedophile.”
“I tell Hale that all this is conflicting for me as someone who loves Ginsberg’s work. I have tried to see his support of Nambla through the lens of his times and specifically in a gay culture context, but it’s disappointing. The most cherished guides in my life were older men who offered mentorship when I needed it as a young adult, and some of those relationships did involve consensual sex. I’m grateful for the kind, well-meaning, older gay men in my life who gave me their own versions of Ginsberg’s reading list, taught me my history, and supported me when I tested positive for HIV. But I have also seen first-hand this dynamic weaponized and tilted toward abuse.”
Peter, subsequently, additionally, adds:
“I take a little umbrage with this idea that Ginsberg was an immoral person, or that the discussion even has to come to “you can love his poetry while rejecting the person.His personality and humanity were every bit as comparable to his poetry, his uncompromising conviction to help the defenseless was in every aspect of his being. He was probably the most generous person I ever met, & the most ethical as well, as over the top as that sounds..
“There’s this misnomer that he was giving full throated endorsements of NAMBLA, as if on on a regular basis. He did one reading for them, and that was was it. He later wrote his essay to defend his position, not them. Did he have some affinity in their message? Sure in that intergenerational paradigm. Age of consent laws are all over the map, and in the UK gay age of consent was 21 till the mid 1990s.”
Post the article, as expected, discussion of the article engendered significant debate, most notably on the poet Ron Silliman‘s Facebook page. Silliman himself writes:
“I had a virtually identical discussion with Allen one summer at Naropa and his response that he felt the need to stand with the most despised people on earth felt very much in keeping with his Buddhist ethics. I wrote it up on my blog and – 17 years later! – that post was the reason that Google banned it and banned me. That simply reporting this was a form of “grooming.”
Meanwhile Frank O’Hara’s poem “Ave Maria” is widely anthologized though it is the anthem of man-boy love. These reactions go back to the criminalization of homosexuality in the early decades of the 20th C. and the ongoing homophobia of many major online practitioners. That young people are often sexual, regardless of orientation, is hardly news. My maternal great grandmother was pregnant at the age of 14 with the first of 13 children she had with her husband, a sequence that stopped only when he fell from a mast and was killed in 1899. That older people often take advantage of this sexuality is also not news – cf.
Lolita
Here’s Aaron Shurin on the same forum:
“This series of comments is much more interesting than the Guardian article, which was more like gentle gossip than an analysis of moral dilemma an social conundrum. I think the problem is a set of conflicting ideas: on one side that young “gay” men have actively curious libidos that process attractions in their bodies in spite of social negation, and whose thwarting can easily lead to self-loathing and rampant homophobia. Given our psychological paralysis about gender gay men may not know what to do with their same sex feelings, simultaneously tenderized and lost. On the other side is the serious risk of older men using power to seize on these unmet inclinations and encourage young men to sexual interactions by leaning on hero worship or brute power or flattery or dizzying speech or many other clever methods of seduction. I don’t see any other comprehension than both of these being true. Young gay men are often so confused – torn between wanting and fearing – that their judgment may be cloudy. Others may be fulfilling erotic and emotional urges with a sense of promise and completion. These two positions may be irreconcilable, but that’s social life on the blue planet.
and Curtis Faville:
“Verbal genius is not linked to other behavioral traits. Skill in writing, or in art, or engineering, et al., is separate from sexuality. Aesthetic taste requires a disinterested acknowledgement of these discrete tracks. I wrote blogs about (James) Schuyler and Jonathan Williams‘ man-boy poems in which I measured the relative value of the work, while neither enforcing nor condemning the homoerotic content. I think on balance Ginsberg tried to be honest and fair sbout who he was, and what his agenda was. The same values must apply across the sexual spectrum. Seducing children is not okay.
The subject is so charged. We’re dealing with deep defenses and innate prejudices, minds fully made up, prior to any detailed and specific information.
Here’s another response (from of all places, Reddit (from “Budget_Counter_2042″)
“It’s American Puritanism taking over cultural speech. This idea (of not separating artist from art) would be unfathomable 20 years ago in Europe, but now, with US cultural monopoly and social media influence, it has taken hold of the world.
Also the infantilisation of readers (or of society): any person with a brain can see that raping children is bad, but that “Howl“ is a hell of a poem. No one will change their minds on the first subject for reading his poems. But everyone seems to think people are dumb and extremely influenced by whatever they consume. So better to censure (directly or indirectly) to protect the poor minds of adults.”