ABSTRACT
Our established narratives of modern sexual identity tell us that during the Cold War, a newly catalyzed, ever more fraught distinction between gay and straight gave rise to the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement. What to do, then, with Allen Ginsberg’s 1954 Love Poem on Theme by Whitman, which indexes an entirely different historical narrative, one much less concerned with our differences than with our commonalities? In the poem, gender and sexuality as both defining polarities and regulatory mech - anisms quickly break down. Indeed, Ginsberg begins Love Poem on Theme by Whitman by literally inserting himself within the heterosexual dyad, “I’ll go into the bedroom silently and lie down between the bridegroom and the bride.”1 Much bed play ensues-it is, after all, a Ginsberg poem-but the poem consistently refuses to say who does what to whom. Lines like “legs raised up crook’d to receive cock in the darkness” do not specify sexuality or gender. Following, as the poem continues, “moans of movement, voices, hands in the air, hands between thighs . . . throbbing contraction of bellies . . . ,” we arrive at the poetic climax, which is also a profoundly corporeal one:
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 farewellall 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.
