# Allen Ginsberg Born June 3, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey; died April 5, 1997 in New York City. American poet and one of the **three founding figures of the Beat Generation** (alongside Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs). Ginsberg's 1956 poem ***Howl*** is one of the most consequential American poetic publications of the 20th century — and is, alongside its 1957 obscenity trial, a foundational document in modern American free-speech and openly-queer literary publishing. ## Howl (1956) and the Obscenity Trial Ginsberg first performed ***Howl*** at the **Six Gallery reading in San Francisco on October 7, 1955** — a performance now considered one of the founding events of the Beat movement. City Lights Books published it as ***Howl and Other Poems*** in October 1956. The poem's third section opens: *"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..."* — and its catalog of unconventional sexual practices, drug experiences, mental-illness commitments, and political alienation produced an immediate obscenity prosecution against City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The October 1957 obscenity trial — *People v. Ferlinghetti* — resulted in a landmark ruling by Judge Clayton Horn that ***Howl* was not obscene** because the work had "redeeming social importance." The ruling established a crucial [[First Amendment]] precedent that protected subsequent decades of openly LGBTQ literary publishing, including [[Edmund White]], [[Larry Kramer]], John Rechy, and many others. ## Openly Gay Public Life Ginsberg lived as openly gay decades before doing so was conventionally possible for a major American literary figure: - He had a long-term partnership with **Peter Orlovsky** from 1954 until Ginsberg's 1997 death - He spoke explicitly about gay sexuality in poetry, interviews, and public lectures from the late 1950s onward — at a time when the vast majority of openly-discussing-homosexuality public figures were medical or legal professionals discussing it pathologically - He was an active early supporter of post-Stonewall gay liberation organizations, including [[Mattachine Society]] events, and an outspoken critic of the [[Lavender Scare]] and ongoing federal anti-gay employment policies ## Other Major Work - ***Kaddish and Other Poems*** (1961) — long elegy for his mother Naomi Ginsberg, who died in a psychiatric institution - ***Reality Sandwiches*** (1963), ***Planet News*** (1968), ***The Fall of America: Poems of These States*** (1973, National Book Award for Poetry) - ***Mind Breaths*** (1978), ***Plutonian Ode*** (1982), ***White Shroud*** (1986) - ***Collected Poems 1947-1980*** (1984), ***Collected Poems 1947-1997*** (2006, posthumous) ## Anti-War and Political Work Ginsberg was an organizer and public participant in essentially every major late-20th-century American antiwar protest movement, from the 1965 Vietnam Day Committee teach-ins through the 1972 Republican Convention protests to the 1980s Central American solidarity work. He coined the phrase **"flower power"** in 1965 in the context of an anti-war demonstration outside the Oakland Army Terminal. ## Place in the Vault Ginsberg is the **most-anthologized openly gay American poet of the post-World War II era** and the bridge figure between the older homophile-era American queer literary tradition (Walt Whitman, Hart Crane) and the post-Stonewall openly LGBTQ literary tradition. The 1957 *Howl* obscenity trial precedent is also one of the load-bearing First Amendment cases in the modern American free-publication-of-LGBTQ-content legal infrastructure. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Mattachine Society]]