Allen Brown, “Life and Love Among  the Beatniks,” The San Francisco Chronicle, (22 June 1958)

Allen Brown’s 1958 San Francisco Chronicle article “Life and Love among the Beatniks,” explores the politics of Beatnik sexuality. Brown’s interviewees believe that the women of the scene, view sex as a symbol of subversion against “stuffy middle-class ideas about premarital virginity (5).” But Brown’s article also reveals that attempts to find symbolic and political meanings in sex, often led to the objectification of minorities within the Beatnik community. Gay men were seen as “non-conformists willing to go all the way (6),” and whites pursued interracial affairs with “Negros” in an effort to “wed the primitive (4).” The parodic drawings of self-serious, scantily clad Beatniks that surround the article’s text objectify the movement as a whole by portraying Beatniks as comical, instead of subversive. In its complex representations of Beatnik sexuality, “Life and Love among the Beatniks” illustrates the way society’s subcultures interact with the world at large.