Allen Ginsberg and LGBTQ+ Literature

At the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, Prosecutor Thomas Foran, attempting to prejudice the jury against my testimony protesting “Spiritual High Intentions” as a motive of “conspiracy” for public assemblage for redress of grievances in Chicago 1968, asked me to read to the jury a series of poems from my books Empty Mirrors and Reality Sandwiches, which he deemed might shock the jury with manifest faggot animality. The following conversation concluded his cross-examination.

Allen Ginsberg September 6, 1972

FORAN: You wrote a book of poems called Reality Sandwiches, didn’t you?

GINSBERG: Yes.

FORAN: In there, there is a poem called “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman.” Would you recite that to the jury?

GINSBERG: “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman,” Walt Whitman being one celebrated bard, national prophet and an important figure in gay history. The poem begins with a quotation of a line by Walt Whitman. It begins with the Walt Whitman line:

I’ll go into the bedroom silently and lie down between the bridegroom and the bride, those bodies fallen from heaven stretched out waiting naked and restless, arms resting over their eyes in the darkness, bury my face in their shoulders and breasts, breathing their skin, and stroke and kiss neck and mouth and make back be open and known, legs raised up, crook’d to receive, cock in the darkness driven tormented and attacking, roused up from hole to itching head, bodies locked shuddering naked, hot hips and buttocks screwed into each others’ and eyes, eyes glinting and charming, widening into look and abandon, and moans of movement, voices, hands in air, hands between thighs, hands in moisture on softened lips, throbbing contraction of bellies till the white come flow in the swirling sheets, and the bride cry for forgiveness, and the groom be covered with tears of passion and compassion, and I rise up from the bed replenished with last intimate gestures and kisses of farewell — all before the mind wakes, behind shades and closed doors in a darkened house, where the inhabitants roam unsatisfied in the night, nude ghosts seeking each other out in the silence.

FORAN: Would you explain the religious significance of that poem?

GINSBERG: As part of our nature, as part of our human nature we have many loves, many of which are denied, many of which we deny to ourselves. He said that the reclaiming of those loves, including the acknowledgment of same-sex love, was the only way that this nation could save itself and become a democratic and spiritual republic. This is a fundamental aspect of civil rights and LGBT activism.

He said that unless there was an infusion of feeling, of tenderness, of fearlessness, of spirituality, of natural sexuality, of natural delight in each other’s bodies, into the hardened, materialistic, cynical, life-denying, clearly competitive, afraid, scared, armored bodies, there would be no chance for spiritual democracy to take place in America.

And he defined that tenderness between the citizens as, in his words, adhesiveness, a natural tenderness flowing between all citizens, not only men and women but also a tenderness between men and men as part of our democratic heritage, part of the adhesiveness which would make democracy function: that men could work together not as competitive beasts but as tender lovers and fellows.

So he projected from his own desire and from his own unconsciousness a sexual urge he felt was normal to the unconscious of most people, though forbidden for the most part to take part.

Walt Whitman is one of my spiritual teachers, and I am following him in this poem, taking off from a line of his own and projecting my own actual unconscious feelings, of which I don’t have shame, sir; which I feel are basically charming, actually.

THE COURT: I didn’t hear that last word.

GINSBERG: Charming.

FORAN: I have no further questions.