Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex

Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex

Marler, Regina

Paperback

Literary Criticism20th Century United States HistoryGLBTQIA Studies

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1573441880
ISBN13: 9781573441889
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: Aug 1 2004
Pages: 209
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.78 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.96
Language: English
The writings that shocked America out of the 1950s

Blasting through the crew-cuts and conformism of their day, the Beat writers were queer in the fullest sense of the word: their fluid sexuality challenged all sexual and romantic conventions. Most shocking of their unconventional attitudes was their embrace of same-sex eroticism. At a time when gay people were considered mentally ill or criminal, the Beats celebrated spontaneity and freedom in thought, word, and action. Their highest value was nakedness--even before Allen Ginsberg stripped bare at a poetry reading to silence a heckler. They would try anything once, then write about it.

Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex traces, for the first time, the queer pulse that throbs throughout the Beats' writings--from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg's wistful, boy-loving sex poems to Jack Kerouac's hero-worship of Neal Cassady--and Kerouac's denial of having sex with men, despite erotic encounters with Ginsberg and Gore Vidal: Posterity will laugh at me if it thinks I was queer.

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