Gay Bikers

            I spent several hours on Saturday working on my paper, which is due on Wednesday, but it still doesn’t look like an essay. I mostly just expanded on some ideas that I had already written down, explaining aspects of sexuality in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”:

           

            In Howl, male masturbation is a desperate drug to get one through the night. Music, sustenance and sex are equated as handouts for the poor, hungry, lonely and unoccupied urban masses.

            In Los Angeles in the 1950s, the Los Angeles Police Department created a vice squad just for entrapping gay men. Undercover cops would pose as homosexuals to ensnare and arrest men for homosexuality, public and private, wrecking their lives for repeated necessary illegal behaviour from coast to coast. One could be picked up by the cops for looking at another man in what could be deemed a sexual way. There was fear of revealing oneself as gay in school gym dressing rooms while surrounded by naked forbidden bodies. Men willingly had passionate sex in police cars with detectives that picked them up for being homosexual pederasts. Wild cooking relates to oral sex with adolescent boys. There was a double standard, in the 1950s regarding sex with children, since the marriage age with parental consent was 12 years old and so pederasty was technically legal for heterosexuals as long as they were married to the given child. Since homosexuality was against the law, the loophole of marriage was not available to gay men and so a homosexual that was also a pederast was a particularly egregious type of sexual deviant, despite the fact that it was legal for straight men to have sex with adolescent girls.

Howling in sexual joy from being sodomized in public places. Arrested for sex crimes and self-exposure in body and in text. “Saintly motorcyclists” seems like an ironic image, but the first Gay motorcycle club was formed in 1954 so that men could travel together and be less of a target for the police as they had been in stationary Gay bars. They were saintly because of sacrifice, generosity, having a calm confidence in who they were, saintly in appearance, wearing crosses, sacrificed to a lifestyle with religious fervour.  

To blow and be blown by those human seraphim, the sailors. In Christianity, seraphim are the highest angels. Ginsberg refers to various men as “angels” or “angel headed hipsters”. He may just mean that they are extremely attractive men. Sailors are exotic and in the sense of being able to travel far and wide, they have wings. They have knowledge of love from exotic lands and their relationship with the ocean can be seen as one with the source of all life, or god. Sailors wear white as the angels do. They are in constant motion as the seraphim are.

            That night I watched the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the story was about a wealthy vineyard owner named Luis, who is throwing a party. His estranged son, Al comes to the party to ask for money but Luis refuses because Al did to go along with an arranged marriage to Kitty, the daughter of the owner of the prosperous adjacent vineyard to his own. Kitty, who is also at the party, had not wanted to marry Al either. Al instead ran off and married one of the vineyard workers and now she is pregnant. Luis tells Al that he will give him $5000 if he can drink him under the table. He appoints Dominic, the sheriff’s son, who was working there that night as a waiter, as the pourer. Even though Al does not drink, he agrees to the contest, but of course he loses. Luis’s secretary, Ruth, Al’s wife, Jeanne and Kitty come into the tasting house to see what’s going on and find Al unconscious. They help to take him away but Luis holds Kitty back and says that his dream can still be realized if she marries him. He tries to hold her but she pushed him away and runs up the stairs. He pursues her and grabs her again, but when he pushed him he tumbles down the stairs and hits his head. She thinks he’s dead and so she runs for help. She tells her friend Dominic and so he goes back to the tasting house. Meanwhile, Luis is not dead. He comes to just as Ruth confronts him and says she had overheard Luis asking Kitty to marry him even though the whole purpose of that night’s party had been to announce at midnight Luis’s engagement to be married to Ruth after twenty years of her having been his secretary. He confirms that he will not marry her and so she takes a magnum of his finest wine, “The Joyful Woman” and hits his head six times until it breaks. Dominic comes in and finds the body but before he can leave to call the police, Ruth pulls a gun on him. She takes him to the cellar and tries to shoot him but finds that the gun is empty and instead hits him with it, knocks him out, flips him into a large empty wine vat, closes the lid, turns on the water and leaves for her bedroom. The water gets higher and higher as the rest of the story unfolds. Dominic’s father, the sheriff, comes to investigate the dead body and hears from Kitty that his son is missing. Kitty discovers that Luis and Ruth had planned their engagement announcement that night and since she knows that Ruth had overheard Luis ask her to marry him, she suspects Ruth of killing Luis. She tells the sheriff and they both go to question Ruth but they find she has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. They force her awake and she tells them that Dominic is in the cellar. Kitty hears the running water and they find Dominic.

            Kitty was played by the lovely Laura Devon. She only did five films and several TV shows between 1060 and 1967. She recorded three songs and then she married French film composer Maurice Jarre and retired from acting.