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Release Date: August 24, 2004
ISBN: 9781573441889
eISBN: 9781573447461

Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex

by Regina Marler

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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About the author Regina Marler
 
 

Regina Marler writes for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, New York Observer, and The Advocate. The author of Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom and the editor of Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, Marler has a terrific talent for writing literary biography and criticism for a general audience. She lives in San Francisco. Queer Beats "Queer Beats [is]...


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Books by Regina Marler
 
 
Reviews
 

"[W]ell-rounded and fascinating."

-- Jim Nawrocki, The Gay & Lesbian Review

 

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