Camille Paglia on the Purity of Allen Ginsberg's Boy-Love

THE PURITY OF ALLEN GINSBERG’S BOY-LOVE

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Dear Camille:

For many of us children of the '60s, the recent death of Allen Ginsberg was a major loss. But some critics contend that Ginsberg's legacy is stained by his support for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. What are your feelings about Ginsberg? What do you think of his pro-NAMBLA stand?
San Francisco hippie

Dear Hippie:

Allen Ginsberg, along with Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, was one of the central figures of my college years in the '60s. He had enormous influence on my intellectual development, and I would be proud to call him my guru.

I was introduced to Ginsberg's masterpieces, "Howl" and "Kaddish," by a brilliant teacher, the poet Milton Kessler, whose fierily rabbinic recitations of those bardic lines are emblazoned in my psyche. Ginsberg's hallucinatory imagery, incantatory rhythms and jazz syncopations are the ultimate, operatic expression of 20th century sexual and political radicalism. I raptly studied and treasured the small, black-and-white City Lights Books editions of the two poems as if they were sacred texts from the Jerusalem that was then avant-garde San Francisco.

Ginsberg is, just as he claimed, in the main line of modern, prophetic poetry from William Blake through Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. Therefore it saddens me that my illustrious graduate-school mentor, Harold Bloom, has always dismissed Ginsberg and even refused to list him among important contemporary American writers in the long appendix to "The Western Canon," which contains many, far lesser figures.

Through his influence on Bob Dylan (who in turn influenced the Beatles), Ginsberg revolutionized rock lyrics and directly affected the thinking of several generations of young people around the world. For this alone, he deserved the Nobel Prize -- which continues to be awarded to safe, standard, derivative, politely leftish, literary humanitarians. Ginsberg's Buddhist mysticism, Hebrew severity, Hindu comedy and African polyrhythm were too original a mix for the stuffy patriarchs of Stockholm.

I met Ginsberg only once, in April 1995 at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which had invited me to be the main speaker at Fiedler Fest, a lavish celebration of readings and performances in honor of longtime star professor Leslie Fiedler. When Ginsberg and I were introduced at a reception, I reverently bowed with hands pressed together in Buddhist homage, a greeting he returned with surprised laughter.

There are a number of photographs of us intensely conversing as we sat together at dinner at the university president's house. Ginsberg was already in ill health. He complained of the censorship on American radio, which prevented his poetry from being widely broadcast and therefore deprived him of his livelihood. He blamed his problems entirely on the government and seemed to know surprisingly little about campus political correctness, which has played so negative a role in the culture wars and has particularly threatened free speech.

As far as Ginsberg's pro-NAMBLA stand goes, this is one of the things I most admire him for. I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In "Sexual Personae," I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization. Donatello's historically pivotal bronze sculpture, "David" (1430), was my main exhibit -- a languidly flirtatious work that would get the artist arrested for kiddie porn these days. In "Vamps & Tramps," I said that Western moralism and hypocrisy have driven the matter underground and overseas, where impoverished Third World boys now supply the sex trade.

Allen Ginsberg was the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality. Like the expansive, sensual, democratic Whitman but unlike the twisted, dishonest, pretentious Foucault, he saw the continuity between great nature and the human body, bathed in waves of cosmic energy. Seen from this pagan perspective, Ginsberg's celebration of boy-love was pure and sinless, demonstrating the limitations of Judeo-Christian paradigms of sexuality.