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ix Preface Once, at a family wedding, a cousin of mine said to the young people we were sitting with, “Before there were hippies, there were beatniks, and before there were beatniks, there were bohemians, and that’s what she was.” Pointing at me. Theodora (“Teddie”) Blum McKee The bohemian era of the literary world I knew has vanished, and it may be necessary to define it for the current generation, which is very different from mine and which seems to see the arts as a power struggle as well as a pathway to celebrity and money. We called that “selling out,” but nowadays who can afford not to sell out—you have to do anything that allows you to pay the rent and, if possible, go on with your creative work. Looking back, it seems a quirk of my generation, so different from today’s, that we believed a true artist should flee the blandishments of the world in order to create his work. If you became famous it must only happen in spite of your rejecting fame, and preferably after death, when you could no longer “sell out.” Nobody I knew ever admitted he wanted to be famous. If we secretly wanted popular success, we weren’t prepared to compromise in any way for it. It should be stressed from the beginning that bohemian life was not about celebrities. There were a few big successes, of course, like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Allen Ginsberg, and scandalous figures like the now-forgotten poet Maxwell Bodenheim, whose sexual exploits and tawdry death were headline events, but mostly we were all sharing the adventure of the arts and sexual freedom together. If fame came, it was usually a by-product of personal exploration and development, though it’s true that Ginsberg was a natural promoter of himself and his circle of friends. That was really beside the point, or maybe was the point, for bohemian life was about unconventionality and ideals, and the Beats famously combined both. And if you just wanted to enjoy living in the Village, you could always say you were a poet. In fact, “poet” was the generic term for any bohemian without talent or ambition. When I arrived in Greenwich Village in 1946 after World War II as an NYU student on the GI Bill, I was immediately captivated by what seemed to me the glamour of the bohemian world with its legends of artists and writers, and even more, by its acceptance of homosexuals . From then on, I had no interest in an academic career, as almost any neophyte writer might today, or any conventional path, even if this meant abandoning the possibility of a secure income— poetry would certainly never bring me one. Being gay, of course, I was not going to have the responsibility of supporting a family. Not that Villagers worried about that much—women were considered able to take care of themselves. A symbol of the bohemian disdain for money was Joe Gould, the scion of the wealthy clan, who had rejected everything his family stood for and slept in Village doorways clutching a paper shopping bag, supposedly with his great poetic opus in it. That was what my commercial artist father worried about when he saw me drawn into Village life—that I would become a homeless bum, standing in the snow in Washington Square without a coat. But the Village was the first taste of relaxing and just being myself that I had ever known—the need to hide being gay unnecessary— and it was exhilarating. For the bohemian world’s first principle was Sexual Freedom, which welcomed all the rejects and refugees from a Puritan America that never allowed much dissent in any area, especially out in the provinces. In the Village it was the opposite, and whatever you were was acceptable. If we were social outcasts, we were proudly, defiantly so. But back then, we were a pitifully small x xi band in exile—homosexuals, blacks, sluts, psychotics, drag queens, radicals of all varieties, artists, ne’er-do-wells. Nowadays, when you can live your alternate lifestyle in almost any part of the country (even if the Matthew Shepherds are still murdered sometimes), it is probably hard to imagine how small a community we were. The bohemian world was also in the vanguard of political thinking , in reaction to the racism and economic inequality of the country , with its hypocritical cant about democracy. And...

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