What Is Liberation?

Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment by John Giono.  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.  368 pp.  $25.49. ****

For the two years I lived in Cambridge—1991-93, while my wife was in Divinity School—I was in bookstore heaven.  It seems strange to say nowadays, when bookstores barely exist.  There was the Harvard Coop, Harvard Bookstore, and Wordsworth, all in close proximity, and down in Boston there was a huge and well stocked Waterstone[1].  But one of my favorites was a small gay bookstore downtown, across from the public library, called Glad Day.

It was a hangout, maybe even a cruising place, for gay men.  It included some porn.  But it also had an incredible selection of books by gay authors, some of whom you might not have realized were gay.  It was a place that stocked all the books of a given author, Gore Vidal, let’s say, or Somerset Maugham (they actually had a better selection of Reynolds Price than most Southern bookstores).  It was an amazing place to browse, because—unlike the other stores—you had the feeling the titles were chosen by a human being, who was stocking exactly what he wanted.

I liked gay literature because it acknowledged that sex was a vital and important part of life, part of one’s personal liberation.  I had just published The Autobiography of My Body, a novel that took that as a premise, and I was glad to frequent a place where other people had the same values.

It was there that I found the Gay Sunshine Interviews, which went into as much detail with writers about their work as the Paris Review interviews, but also included their sex lives.  They were more like conversations than interviews, gossipy as hell.  The first volume included Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, a whole host of my favorites.  And it was the first place I ever ran into the name John Giono, a poet who had published a book entitled Cancer in My Left Ball (talk about an unforgettable title), and whose interview, especially in terms of his sex life, was astonishing.  He also practiced Tibetan Buddhism, and I had just begun my Buddhist practice.

Giono was a Pop poet, associated more in his life with artists than with other writers (though he eventually grew close to William Burroughs, living in the same building and having meals with him), and he became quite interested in—and apparently adept at—performing his poetry in a variety of ways.  (Among other people, he enlisted Bob Moog, who helped him use the Moog Synthesizer.)  I don’t know his standing in the world of poetry, or if he even has one (though he did teach for a while at the Naropa Institute, along with Ginsberg and Ann Waldman).  But as a figure in the New York art scene, he was a kind of gay Zelig.  He showed up everywhere.  And if that world interests you, beginning in the early sixties in New York, you will delight in this book.

Here’s a list of the men he slept with, most of them as lovers for a period of time: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Keith Haring.  (Fun fact: he was the protagonist in the Andy Warhol movie Sleep.  He was the sleeper.)  He also had a promiscuous sex life where he slept around, though he doesn’t talk a lot about it (except that’s how he had sex with Keith Haring, in a bathroom in the subway station[2].  Haring later showed up at a party at his house, and Giono said, Hey wait a minute, don’t I know this guy?).  And if you’re interested in these people, and want to know their penis size, and what they did in bed, this is the book for you.  That was what astonished me about the Gay Sunshine Interviews.  They regarded such details as completely relevant.

I must admit that I grew a little tired of Giono’s accounts of sex (I must be getting old).  And not just sex, but extremes of drinking and drug taking, late nights, hangovers lasting far into the next day.  When Giono and Burroughs lived in the same building, the cocktail hour began rather early, I believe it was 3:30, and the stiff drinks they both had were accompanied by multiple joints, while Giono cooked an elaborate meal (assuming he could still see).  Burroughs was not a Buddhist, but apparently had a strong interest in the human mind; he was the companion Giono found most fascinating.  The truth is that for most of his life Giono was the other guy, the guy who showed up with Warhol or Rauschenberg and was introduced as a young poet.  He didn’t seem to resent that role.  He was glad to be at the party.

Giono was a young man when China invaded Tibet; he was part of the Free Tibet movement and was always interested in the country and in its religion.  When he finally decided to study it, he actually traveled to India and studied with the lamas who had fled there, including his primary teacher, Dudjom Rinpoche.  He engaged in vigorous and strenuous practice, most of which would have been too much for the average Westerner, but he threw himself into it and continued to practice for the rest of his life.  He went on month-long retreats once or twice a year, had a vigorous daily practice.  He said he awoke at 5:30 (in the old days he wouldn’t have gone to bed yet), stretched and had coffee and began meditating at 6:00, practiced until 9:00 AM.  I don’t know a lot of people as dedicated as that.

I was a little surprised when the drinking, drugs, and all the sex continued.  I understand the mindset of gay men of his generation: gay life had been repressed when they were young, and they were going to throw off the traces and live the hedonistic life they all wanted.  I was actually quite moved when he spoke of that bizarre encounter with Keith Haring in the subway restroom, and of Haring’s belief that sex was the best way to know another person, to actually become that person.  Haring had HIV when they had that encounter, and later died of AIDS.  Giono has no idea why he never got the virus like so many of his contemporaries.  After all the drugs and drinking and a rather rich diet (he describes serving meals that included fettucini alfredo and filet mignon), he died in 2019, at the age of 82, of a heart attack.  He had been troubled with heart problems only toward the end of his life.  The man must have had a hell of a constitution.

One of the notices on Amazon describes this book as poorly written; I didn’t feel that way at all.  It was apparently composed over the course of 25 years (?); I found the writing not exceptional but perfectly serviceable.  And the spirit of the book, of a man who lived his life fully and just the way he wanted to, is wonderful.  Buddhists assume that when one attains liberation, the desires will fall away (and maybe you won’t have to deal with hangovers that last into the afternoon).  As I’ve felt with other Tibetan Buddhists, most notably Chogyam Trungpa (with whom Giono did retreats), I’m less surprised by all the sex, which seems like a form of ecstasy, than with the drugs and drinking, which seem to cloud the mind.  But Giono’s Buddhist liberation was intertwined with his gay liberation, and he apparently found the life he wanted.

And Great Demon Kings is fun.  It’s loaded with gossip.  It’s irresistible.

[1]Where I went to a reading by and actually met the great Pittsburgh writer John Edgar Wideman.

[2] Giono’s habit, whenever he had to wait for the subway, was to pop into the bathroom and start having sex with somebody.  If the subway came, he didn’t.