MAP Forum

The other day in my undergraduate course on American society and culture, we were talking about sexual liberalization since the 1960s. At the start of the LGBTQ movement back in the ’70s, I noted, there was significant support for changing or eliminating laws on the age of consent. Among important players in that movement, including Harry Hay, there was even advocacy of the acceptability of sexual relations between adults and minors.
My students had never heard of Hay, so I gave them a brief sketch. Hay cofounded The Mattachine Society, which was the first “gay rights” group in the country. He was also an outspoken communist. Hay had this, among other similar things, to say about adult-minor sexual relations: “If the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world.”
Hay also spoke positively about his own teenage sexual relationship with an adult male: “I send to all of you my love and deep affection for what you offer to the boys, in honor of this boy when he was fourteen, and when he needed to know best of all what only another gay man could show him and tell him.”

Since Hay’s death, I told my students, there has been a fierce effort by the LGBTQ+ movement to lionize him and to eliminate all reference in the public sphere to his beliefs about pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia. But this is all easily uncovered by a brief Google search, for anyone who can be troubled to know the truth.
Indeed, one can even learn online that Hay was a long-time supporter of NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association), a group of such infamy that it scarcely needs a summary. I also told my students that Allen Ginsberg was an outspoken and fervent supporter of NAMBLA and, moreover, that much evidence exists that he lived his life according to its principles.
Many of the young did not know who Ginsberg was, either. In my view, given that almost none of his poetic work rises above the level of dreck and much of it floats at the offensive and perverse, that’s perhaps not such a bad thing in purely literary terms. But I was concerned that they were so completely unaware of his important and bizarre role in American cultural history.
So, the next day I gave them some appropriate facts about his life, which I share in what follows. It is something of a fingernail sketch of the hidden, intimate connection between the “mainstream” of the LGBTQ+ movement and the extremities of sexual violence and perversion.
Be forewarned: what follows is disturbing stuff.

As I just noted, Ginsberg was a member of NAMBLA and long supported the group. He claimed publicly on one occasion that his support was only on the grounds of “free speech,” that is, that he supported only their right to express their views, and not necessarily the views themselves.
You may judge that claim for yourself, with the following data at hand.
He can be seen in a documentary film Chickenhawk: Men Who Love Boys reading his poem “Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass” and, in another scene, holding a mask of a young boy. The entire film is online here.
Should you not be familiar with that literary work he is reading, it is here in his collected works, on p. 621. Look at it if you dare. Graphic does not even begin to describe it. It concerns a sexual encounter with a boy he “met … in the street [who] carried [his] package.”
Ginsberg wrote a good deal of poetry dealing with the topic of sexual interaction with boys, all available in his collected works. See “The Guest” on p. 918 (“… the thing I want most, To embody my joy, Is the belly of a boy …”), or “Please Master” on p. 502 (“… please master can I touch lips to your hard muscle hairless thigh …”). Other poems seem to be expressing the intentional desire to contract sexually transmitted disease through homosexual sex, for example “Violent Collaborations” on p. 1033 (“Give me your loathsome disease, F### me & fist me … Degrade and debase me, In public deface me”). In “Autumn Leaves,” he describes waking early and “leaving a naked boy asleep by the wall …”
Ginsberg’s poetry is taught in schools across the country. A whole subgenre of literary “scholarship” deals with his pornographic depictions of sexual relations with children and other such topics as if they were perfectly acceptable. Note this article, which is a long, scholarly discussion of Ginsberg’s concern in many poems with … his own anus.

But perhaps this is just literary excess? Well, here he is in an interview where he unambiguously says he regularly had sexual relationships with teen boys. Note the author of that piece inserts into Ginsberg’s quote the modifying noun “men,” as in “[… men who were] 16, 17, 18.” We do not know what term Ginsberg used to describe the teenagers with whom he was having sex, but it is clearly legally incorrect to call 16- and 17-year-old teen boys “men.” Elsewhere, he admitted to having had sexual relations with a boy as young as 14. The age of consent in California where Ginsberg lived was 18. He is explicitly admitting to having sexual contact with boys who were under that age. Let’s speak clearly, then: He is confessing here to numerous counts of statutory rape, even if the author of the piece is eager to try to distort the true meaning of his statement.
Marcus Ewert, who was 17 at the time of their liaison, is one of the boys with whom Ginsberg, later in life, admitted to having had sexual contact.
As noted above, Ginsberg pretended that he joined NAMBLA merely in the spirit of defending the group’s freedom of speech, and he compared NAMBLA to anti-war activists the government had an interest in tracking. He claimed: “I’m a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too—everybody does, who has a little humanity.” He also said of NAMBLA’s critics: “Are they against men, are they against boys, are they against love?”
The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin knew Ginsberg personally, and she straightforwardly identified him as a “pedophile.” The evidence is quite strong that Dworkin was a disturbed character herself, but this does not negate the possibility of her being basically accurate about Ginsberg, especially given other supporting evidence.

Amazingly, considering the negligible effect this revelation had on his posthumous reputation, Ginsberg never even really tried to hide the fact that he was attracted to underage boys and that he acted out this attraction on a regular basis, though his fans have engaged themselves in furiously denying it since his death. Even some of Ginsberg biggest fans, if they still adhere to standards of honesty, admit that Ginsberg made “unfortunate” public statements of support for “intergenerational affections and affairs” and described age of consent laws as the “mind rape” of youth.
As I told my students, it says something significant about the cultural politics of the contemporary university, and American literary culture more generally, that Ginsberg is so lionized there, despite all the evidence that he was an active ideological supporter of sex with children and a personal participant in acts that legally would have been defined as statutory rape.

Of course, as I have written elsewhere, works of artists should not be judged solely on the basis of the artist’s personal qualities. Richard Wagner and Miles Davis, for example, were unpleasant characters as people, and yet they produced music of lasting value. We should not discard it because they were imperfect humans. It is one thing, though, to hold offensive ideas while writing great works that do not contain those ideas, and quite another to base your artistic fame on a collection of works that include things like “Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass” and “Please Master.” If Miles Davis had titled an album I Like to Beat the Women I Love, or Wagner had written an opera called The Jewish Problem, we would be in a different position in evaluating the meaning of their work than we are with Kind of Blue and Der Ring des Nibelungen.

The work of those like Ginsberg—and there are other such figures, including his friend William Burroughs—is permanently tainted by his poisonous ideas and perverted acts. The fact that our educational and literary institutions do not recognize this obvious fact proves how morally diseased they have become. Figures like Ginsberg are a telling focal point for the dangerous radicalism of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s.