Discuss Homosexuality in the Beat Generation

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"In the age that coined the word "togetherness" as a synonym for family values, the Beats, each in his own style mounted the first open, sustained assault in American history on the masculine role as heterosexual spouse, father and grown-up provider. In the midst of the Cold War crusade against all deviations from the masculine norm, in the era that could almost be said to have invented the idea of classified information, they openly addressed homosexuality, bisexuality, and masturbation in their work, declassifying the secrets of the male body, making sexuality as complex as individual identity and pushing their chosen forms to new limits in the process" (Ann Douglas)

Discuss with reference to one or more authors.

At the end of the `Cold War', the early years of the 1950's represented all that was wholly good and traditional about family life. Women were homemakers, men lived up to the expected strong masculine role of the provider and a conventional family with children, was normality. Morality and values were of key importance and were inbuilt and represented through family life. Therefore it is imperative to examine the social history of post World War II America, to understand and emphasise the impact of the Beat Generation writers on this era at that time. It is then possible to see the acute disparity of style and attitude between the Beats and that of the 1950's "family values" epoch. Oliver Harris argues that the fundamental reason Beat culture "seized centre-stage in the theatre of early Cold War America...is because its major figures worked on a very particular range of margins." The contentious question, however is where does the margin of homosexuality stand in relation to Cold War ideology and Beat Cultural po...

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...er, "Queer Shoulders, Queer Wheel: Homosexuality and Beat Textual Politics

Stimpson. Catherine R, "The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual Liberation

Dollimore. Jonathan, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991

Corber. Robert J, Homosexuality in the Cold War: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham N.C Duke University Press 1997

Senate Report "Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government," cited in John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970 (Chicago: University Press, 1983

Charters, Selected Letters

Ginsberg, Collected Poems

`The Knitting Circle:Movement, Mattachine Society' http://myweb.lsbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/mattachine.html

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