Subduing the
Demons in America
An Interview with John Giorno

By Bill DeNoyelles

Part 2

Money, School and Drugs
“I have a concept of why things happened as they did in the sixties and seventies. There are three major things that came to completion in the early sixties. The first thing is money–everyone in the sixties was rich for the first time. There had been two hundred years of America’s prosperity. The upper and lower middle classes were rich like they never were since the beginning of history. That was the result of WWII and the incredible industrial explosion that took place. What was different here was that the middle classes thought and believed that they were rich. They believed they could do anything they wanted to. The second thing was that everyone had an education. Starting with the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century everybody was educated, relatively speaking. Everybody achieved a degree of their possibilities or their capabilities. In the forties and fifties if you were really smart it was very easy to get a scholarship and go to a university. If you were dumb you could get in too. Everybody was educated for the first time in the world, a huge swath of society from the poor to the rich. The third thing was drugs. You add this to wealth and education and you get, at least in my mind, what created the huge creative explosion of the sixties.

“There was a liberation of art and society. A liberation on all levels, it was a broad scope with gay lib as part of it. It was unique in the history of the world. It had never ever happened before. If you go back to the nineteenth century you have a few rich people who were writing in England or France like Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Guys who were very elitist, making great art, who happened to be gay. Everybody else in the late nineteenth century didn’t experience that luxury or freedom. Go back to the eighteenth century and the age of enlightenment. There are a few nobles who had the opportunity to write. And the Romans were a bunch of stupid jerks who were promiscuous but were bound by ignorance. Their promiscuity didn’t mean anything. They were just decadent.
“What happened in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s was unique in the history of the world because it was done with great awareness, open mindedness and compassion.

“I’ve always been very much in your face about being gay. There’s a reason for that. I grew up in New York City. I happened to make this connection with the art world very early on like in 1960, ’61, ’62. I met a few people and all the sudden I was in an extended scene of poets, painters and artists. Many of them were gay. Shortly after 1962 they all became famous. In the early sixties they weren’t. They were Andy Warhol, Rob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. They were gay men, artists and they were famous in that they did what they wanted to do. They came from relatively poor backgrounds and making money was really important to them because they had no money to live on. What they included in the content of their work was very important to them as well. In those years being gay was the kiss of death. To be a gay artist or to have gay subject matter was something that could never be sold to a rich person to hang over their couch. It couldn’t be sold to a museum because the world was very homophobic. It still is. In those years the revolution hadn’t happened yet. There was no liberation of content.

“I’m a gay man and a poet. The big influences on me were other poets and writers. To see what William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg did with their work in the context of being gay and explicit was an eye opener. I was in the art world where Robert Raushenberg or Andy [Warhol] would never allow a gay image in their work– ever! Andy did it secretly with The Cock Book. They consciously were not gay because they didn’t want to ruin their lives. The last thing they needed was the big problem of a dick in a painting and all the sudden they get branded as a gay artist.

“They’re coming out of the situation of the 1950’s with the Abstract Expressionists who were very homophobic. I knew them too when I was very young. I knew their wives–Lee [Krasner] Pollack, Ruth Klingman, Roselle Davies. I knew these guys through their wives. These men were really homophobic in the way your grandfather might be. They were straight men that believed only men like themselves made great works of art. Rothko, Pollack and deKooning were extremely macho. Their wives had tons of gay friends that they invited to dinners along with their famous husbands, who treated gay men as though they weren’t the same as them. These guys put up with them because they were like their wives or girls or something. They were not treated equally by these men.

“Andy [Warhol] and Jasper [Johns] come directly out of that. The last thing they wanted was to be put in a gay ghetto by Rothko or deKooning. I have some sympathy for why they did that. That triggered something in my heart, some anger about ‘how dare they not use the images from the center of their heart.’ These were my lovers, I knew what their minds were like. That made me be sexually in your face from the beginning in 1962 when I did Pornographic Poem. It didn’t get published until 1964 and didn’t get made into a record until 1966. To do that kind of gay pornographic poem was something none of these artists would think of doing. When Andy was doing his movie Kiss, which was Naomi Levine kissing 10 guys, I said ‘Andy why don’t you have 2 guys kissing?’ He didn’t even answer me. He did that thing of turning his eyes in another direction. A few days later I said it again and again he didn’t answer me. It was such a bad idea that it wasn’t worthy of a response. It gave me the reaction of going completely in another direction.

“I thought that it was heroic to be gay in your work. I’m not worrying about losing the sale of a painting or the critics. I’m not a painter I’m a poet. So it was a heroic action, a heroic stance like going into battle not caring if you got killed because your intention was to do so. My reaction against all those artists was something that propelled me into being gay in my work.

“Pop culture came out of Pop Art. Pop Art came out of the seven pop artists. I was there and saw what had happened. When they were doing those first paintings in 1961 it wasn’t about mirroring pop culture. It was about seeing what was here. Seeing the phenomena of the world around you. This is Andy Warhol. They arrived at this somehow through great pain and suffering. They didn’t do it as playfulness. Andy picked these pop images and made real art out of them. All these artists had their own ways of doing it. They were quite different from each other.

“These were just images of/in our culture that were soaked in our brains. That’s why Andy Warhol is such a great artist and why he changed the world. He more than anyone else. The idea being that you pick something out of your mind that mirrors the world that’s in your mind. That’s so different from the images used by deKooning. That’s why deKooning, Pollack and Rothko hated Andy. He did something that was revolutionary. It sort of negated them. They refused to acknowledge it. He used silkscreens, which to them was almost ‘fag’ art–‘A commercial artist uses silkscreens! We use paint and a paint brush!’ Or whatever it was they used. As Pop Art evolved in 1965 it did mirror rock n’ roll and popular culture. In its first stages it was very, very pure. Andy had an understanding of emptiness. When you see those paintings of Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans and the first Marilyns– they’re based on an understanding of emptiness. Phenomena arising as Coca-Cola. Andy would’ve liked to be perceived of as a nihilist but he wasn’t. He was very much a Roman Catholic, which he was when he died. He never gave that up in his mind. He had the mix of phenomena arising in this world and it being empty. I don’t know how he got at it. Being a Catholic he wasn’t understanding emptiness as such but in his art-mind he knew what he was doing.

“It was a slow change. We’re talking about the early sixties. Other than Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs nobody used pornographic images in their work. It was still that way in 1966, ’67, ’68. Any explicit image gay or straight was unheard of. It was not part of the culture. What happened was the cumulative effect of drugs being taken from the early sixties into the middle sixties. By 1969 Hair, where everyone took off their clothes publicly onstage, was on Broadway. There was a naked picture, or an almost naked picture, on the cover of Time Magazine. The difference between 1968 and ’69 was enormous! By those years there was a deluge of openness. I think Screw happened somewhere in that time period. The gay newspapers followed a year or so after. Magazines like Fag Rag. By 1969 promiscuity was in your face and on the newsstand. The culture had really changed. By 1970 or ’71 it was endemic. As we got into the seventies I stopped using so many pornographic images. There were so many all over the place that was not as important to do this thing. The world had been changed.

“When I first went to India an 1970-’71 and many times after, I would bring these things where my work appeared. Like Gay Sunshine where I’d have an interview or poem. I’d bring 10 or 20 copies with me, give one to my teacher Dudjom Rinpoche, show the others around. They would leaf through this newspaper. There were pictures of naked guys having sex and they’d just laugh. I’d show them to the monks and they’d laugh even though they weren’t particularly gay. I’d go back to a house and see two women laughing and giggling looking at this stuff because they had never seen such a thing.

Part 1: Subduing the Demons in America
Part 2: Money, School and Drug
Part 3: Balling Buddha
Part 4: Up Against the Wall
Part 5: The Process
Part 6: Dial A Poem
Part 7: Grasping At Emptiness
Part 8: Kissing, Intimacy and Affection
Pornographic Poem/John Giorno