Wallace de Ortega Maxey

Author of MAN IS A SEXUAL BEING (Fabian-1958). Minister and social worker. Founding member of The Mattachine Foundation (for which his church asked his resignation). Director of The Fellowship of Universal Existentialists; member of The Society For The Scientific Study of Sex; Editor of the magazine SEX & CENSORSHIP.

I have seen some gangling seamen and longshoremen, truck drivers, woodsmen and cement-construction workers, that would surprise all hell out of you when you listen to their conversation. In their particular fields of interest and study they are extraordinarily well informed. There is one chap I am thinking of who has been a seaman all his life, who can keep you spell-bound when telling about the "history of erotica". Another, a female, could write a book about the world's historic prostitutes and how they have influenced political thought. Still another homo-beat has been in several mental institutions under observation, but can reel off anything you want to know about the religions of the Orient. Of course, I am speaking of the real Beats, the ones who have severed all ties with the square world, as far as it is humanly possible to do, and still live.

It has been said that Allen Ginsberg is the St. Peter of the beat generation. He has been quoted in the New York Post (3-13-59) as saying: "I sleep, with men and with women. I am neither queer nor not queer, nor am I bi-sexual. My name is Allen Ginsberg and I sleep with whoever I want." It has been my experience in discussing life in general with a considerable number of Beats, that these words of Allen Ginsberg voice quite accurately the opinions of the majority of the real Beats.

As I have stated in my book Man is a Sexual Being (Fabian 1958), why waste so much time in life denying or attempting to deny that which you are and were before you could utter a

one

single word. By the time human beings were learning to roast a pig over. the coals of a burning hut, they were already as proficient in the art of sex as they ever will be. The average Beatnik feels we are giving too much time to the castration of sex instead of enjoying it.

Dr. Wilhelm Stekel has said, "A poet is a dreamer who is capable of transforming into dramatic structures the castles he has built in the air." Many of the beat generation are such, but comparatively few have the stamina to bring into reality, as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and several of the Angry Young Men of England have, the results of their dreams.

Ibsen has been called the poet of doubt as is manifest in his great work Peer Gynt. Ibsen was an early Beatnik. The type is most certainly not new either to history or psychology. The Beats should canonize him as the St. John the Baptist of the beat generation. The Beatnik's works, acts, writings and music (progressive jazz) betray the poet's or painter's struggle for peace within himself and shows his conflicts caused by the demands of ideal ego.

Every Beatnik, hetero or homo, is ruled by his bipolar tendencies. You see it very clearly in Jack Osborne's play, Look Back In Anger. Love and hate, the need for freedom paradoxically in conflict with the need for dependence, the sexual conscience and the sexual instinct, making demands for the most secret and detailed exploration. There are the polygamous and monogamous yearnings; homosexual and heterosexual tendencies. The play points out quite clearly as

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