My favorite story of 2008 may have been one that occurred 37 years ago. Last week the National Security Archive published online transcripts of phone conversations beloved war criminal Henry Kissinger had back in the Nixon days. It seems that everyone was covertly taping each other then, creating a sort of aural house of mirrors effect, because each was convinced (correctly) that the other was taping the conversation as well. Trust is a beautiful thing.
One day in 1971, Kissinger took a call from Allen Ginsberg. The poet, who had tried to levitate the Pentagon as far back as 1967 and was still prone to playing finger cymbals and chanting at any anti-war event of a certain magnitude, wanted to have a meeting, brokered by Eugene McCarthy, to talk about Vietnam. “Perhaps you don’t know how to get out of the war,” he told the secretary of state, not unreasonably.
Whether sincere or not, Kissinger said he was open to such a powwow. “I like to do this,” he said, “not just for the enlightenment of the people I talk to, but to at least give me a feel of what concerned people think.”
“It would be more useful if we could do it naked on television,” Ginsberg suggested.
The transcript records that Kissinger laughed. Ginsberg said he could be reached at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and that he had just attended a gay rights demonstration. That’s right: in 1971.
I am trying now to imagine what contemporary poet would make such a suggestion to Condoleeza Rice. I am trying to imagine her taking the call.
By way of a sign-off Ginsberg said, “You may have to subject yourself to prayer.”
What’s more surprising was Kissinger’s reply: “That is a private matter that is permissible.”
Naked or not, the meeting never happened.
Great story, it made my night!
You seem surprised that a gay rights demo took place in 1971. Why?
The Stonewall rebellion had occurred two years before, and in the latter half of 1969 the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front were already well enough developed to have become rivals of sorts. That was also the year of the first gay pride march (which has now become the “gay parade,” for better or for worse).
A number or politically oriented gay organizations had already existed since the 1950s, such as the Mattachine Soceity (founded in 1950) and the Daughters of Bilitis (1955).
For more information, I wish I could refer you to Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” or to Rich Simonson and Scott Walker’s “Multi-Cultural Literacy,” but both books are all but silent on LGBT culture, history, and politics.
P.S. That’s Rick Simonson. Typo.