2. Allen Ginsberg
As a writer and poet, Irwin Allen Ginsberg is frequently considered to be one of the leading figures of the counterculture movement in the 1960s. He embodied various aspects of the counterculture, from his views on drug-use, openness to Eastern religion, and his hostility to bureaucracy. He also opposed sexual repression, militarism, and economic materialism.
Allen Ginsberg’s love life caused a great deal of controversy in the United States. He had relationships with several men but also had a lifelong partner named Peter Orlovsky. His poem, “Howl”, particularly caught the attention of the press. In it, Ginsberg denounced conformity and the destructive forces of capitalism in the US. However, the poem’s description of homosexual sex did not go down well in some circles and became the subject of an obscenity trial. At the time, homosexual acts were a crime in every US state. Fortunately, however, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled the poem was not obscene.
Ginsberg remained very active in protests against the Vietnam War. He signed the anti-war anti-draft manifesto “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” in 1967. In 1968 he also signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, refusing to pay tax in protest against the atrocities of the Vietnam War.
One of the more unusual acts he participated in involved the so-called ‘levitation of the Pentagon. In October 1967, anti-war protesters marched on the Pentagon to ‘levitate’ the building “300 feet in the air” (according to Abbie Hoffman). Ginsberg himself deemed it a success: “the Pentagon was symbolically levitated in people’s minds in the sense that it lost its authority which had been unquestioned and unchallenged until then. But once that notion was circulated in the air, and once the kid put his flower in the barrel of the kid looking just like himself but tense and nervous, the authority of the Pentagon psychologically was dissolved.” Speakers followed the event with a variety of anti-war speeches and poems.
What happened to Allen? Well, in 1960 doctors treated Ginsberg for a tropical disease; it is thought he contracted hepatitis at this point. In the 1970s, he then suffered two minor strokes diagnosed with Bell’s palsy. Muscles on one side of his face consequently drooped. In 1996, after returning home from the hospital where they had unsuccessfully tried to treat his congestive heart failure, he made phone calls to friends and family to say goodbye. Apparently, even Johnny Depp received a phone call. He died on the 5th April 1997 after succumbing to liver cancer via complications of hepatitis. He was seventy-years-old.