Ginsberg’s bodies are ugly and bloody and suffering, and always seem to be searching for something in the journey across America that the poem depicts. The bodies of Ginsberg’s focus are bodies so often “destroyed by madness” and “cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully” (“Howl”). Ginsberg’s expressions of queerness start with the body, but not the body under heteronormative, neurotypical, and physically abled representation in American culture. Unlike other poets, who put America under a utopian lens, Ginsberg finds his America through the embrace of chaos and self-destruction, letting queer and disabled bodies drag the United States down to hell where they might be free. In Ginsberg, we find queerness in a world that does not feel so carefree or accepted by the normative American culture it finds itself in, but a yearning to find New York and America in more radical expressions of self, one that must make room for the difference of disability and sexuality. However, when one enters the Queer Imaginarium of New York through the eyes of Allen Ginsberg, one finds the queer city of America full of hardship, of New Yorkers with “their shoes full of blood” (Ginsberg), who live in a wild world of “with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls.” Vincent Millay, or Emma Lazarus, New York is a somewhat magical and carefree site of queer expression. For queer writers like Walt Whitman, Edna St.

David Bergman argues that New York is “a place of and for the imagination” ( The Queer Writer in New York 1) that is central to what Bergman calls the American “Queer Imaginarium” (3), and because of this has attracted many overlapping and contradictory depictions of and through queer identity.

Carl solomon howl