Great Demon Kings

Starred review from March 9, 2020
The creativity and debauchery of gay artists and writers blooms in this exuberant memoir of avant-garde New York from the 1950s through the 1990s. Giorno (Subduing Demons in America), a poet and artist who died last year, recounts his relationships with a countercultural pantheon including Allen Ginsburg, whom he considered a “living god” before meeting him and who proved to be a “disappointment”; Andy Warhol, who filmed Giorno sleeping in the six-hour film Sleep; artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, with whom he carried on tempestuous affairs; and Beat deity William S. Burroughs, with whom he had an intense, mainly platonic friendship for decades. Giorno also discusses his conversion to Tibetan Buddhism and his technology-driven poetry innovations, including tape-recorded poetry “sound poems,” multimedia readings, and a “Dial-a-Poem” service offering callers recorded poems. The narrative is a whirl of parties, art openings, colorful personalities, and lots of graphic sex, written in prose that twines earthiness with Buddhist austerity. (“Pale light from a streetlamp streamed through the window mixed with the humid air and gave William a rat-gray fungus-like complexion,” he writes of having sex with Burroughs. “Our minds mingled in one taste, in the vast, empty expanse of primordially pure, Wisdom Mind.”) The result is an engrossing, passionate ode to a revolution in art and sensuality. Photos.

April 1, 2020
The ultimate scenester of midcentury Manhattan, lover to a who's who of gay artists and writers, tells all in a posthumous memoir. Giorno (1936-2019) made his first major appearance on the American cultural landscape in Andy Warhol's 320-minute movie of Giorno's slumbering face, Sleep (1964). This memoir is also overlong, but the author has plenty of interesting stories to tell. He quickly dispenses with his privileged childhood, though we do hear about his first poem, written during his sophomore year in high school: "I was like a baby Olympic athlete going over the high bar for the first time." Giorno graduated from Columbia in 1958, bursting with self-confidence. "I was young and beautiful and that got me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex," he writes, and proceeds to share an abundance of graphic detail. Andy Warhol never really enjoyed it, and his wig got in the way at key points, but Giorno found his toe-sucking "deeply moving." A multiyear affair with Robert Rauschenberg was filled with bliss and joy and mind-blowing sex. (Rauschenberg was not looking forward to being memorialized by Giorno, but his threat to sue expired with his death.) Jasper Johns was the author's lover during the exciting period when his Dial-A-Poem project was the hottest thing in New York City. William Burroughs was Giorno's next great passion despite Burroughs' small penis and his instigating a threesome with Giorno's "nemesis," Allen Ginsberg--and Ginsberg was everywhere. Even when the author went to India to seek enlightenment, there he was, "fat and full of ego, an embarrassing uncool dad." After Ginsberg's death, the author admits the two of them "did not do such a good job in this life...we will, sure as hell, continue in future lives." If reincarnation exists, Giorno will surely document it for us. Upbeat, funny, unsparing, and way over the top...probably a lot like the man himself.

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