Queer Sexuality: La Grande Permission

This chapter explores the importance of Ginsberg’s sexuality in the context of his life and work. Aware of his nonnormative sexual desires from an early age, Ginsberg’s lifelong quest for self-understanding was necessarily shaped and informed by poetic explorations into his sexuality, his relationship with which was sometimes fraught. His work bears the imprint of his enduring preoccupation with the variable experiences of queer minds and bodies (often his own) in both straight and queer spaces. The chapter examines selected canonical poems including “A Supermarket in California,” “My Sad Self,” “Howl,” “City Midnight Junk Strains,” and “The Green Automobile,” in order to highlight their generative provocations in the context of a period of prevailing queer invisibility and to emphasize Ginsberg’s legacy as a queer poet in the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines the relationship between Ginsberg’s status as a queer pioneer and some of the more troubling aspects of his in some areas limited and limiting visions and modes of sexuality.