Gay Sunshine Interview

by Allen Young

42 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...school is irrelevant to poetry and everything else anyway. I mean school is something from the nineteenth century. Poetry has gone back to 15,000 B.C."
(on the topic of Walt Whitman's homoerotic poetry not being the Whitman we read in school).
A great interview transcript from 1973 at Cherry Valley farm near Lake Otsego in New York. A wide-ranging, informative and fun conversation.

[Rowan Gleser · Rating 4 out of 5]

cool :)

[James Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long interview with Allen Ginsberg from the early 1970s, originally published in a gay liberation magazine. Not really about poetry, mostly about Ginsberg's love life and his views on queer politics. Wide-ranging, gossipy accounts of who balled who in the Beat-era, but more interestingly a defense of Ginsberg's NAMBLA views, a description of his pre-gay marriage marriage to Peter Orlovsky, his take on Stonewall, how homosociality and homosexuality can open up space for healthier relationships between men and women, a sexual line of transmission Ginsberg traces through shared lovers from Whitman to himself, etc. A coherent and compelling sexual worldview that would be difficult to hold today in the milieux that perceive themselves to be equally Left and descendent from the movements discussed. Though Ginsberg is speaking only four decades ago, it's largely foreign.

[Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

random find at the university library book sale. interview with allen ginsberg