There Were Women in the Beat Generation, Too

When Elise Cowen (New York, 1933-1962) committed suicide by jumping out of her 7th story window, her parents asked her acquaintances to burn everything she had written. They didn’t want the world to find out what her lifestyle had been like: drugs, sex, lesbian relationships, an abortion, asylums and more. Much of the female artistic creation from the Beat Generation was, like Cowen’s works, surreptitiously “buried” in one way or another, so now the generation’s artistic movement is associated with untamed and transgressive men: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs. Gregory Corso, another poet of the generation, explained in a 1994 tribute to the female Beats, “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the 50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up. There were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about them.”

Luckily, not all of Cowen’s writings were lost. Leo Skir, a close friend of the writer, kept 83 of her poems, which he published. A half-century later, playwright and director Mario Hernández has used these poems as a point of departure for his play, “Beat G. Un Latido Diferente” (“Beat G. A Different Beat”), which reconstructs the nasty surprises that awaited those women who came too near to freedom, in a world where it seemed that only men had the right to do so.

The work, which debuted on Friday in Madrid’s Naves Matadero, intertwines Cowen’s writing with the memoirs of Cowen’s friend, Joyce Johnson. Johnson, who had been Kerouac’s girlfriend for a few years, later wrote about her experiences during those years in the book “Minor Characters,” in which she also included poems by other authors of the time, later rescued in “Beat Attitude” (2015). Together, these works offer a mosaic of the lives of the women who, though they had been inspired by the same realities as the men, were left in the shadows. Not even most male Beats, rebels like Kerouac and Ginsberg, valued them as artists. “They considered them to be muses, girlfriends, lovers, or even − often, oddities,” explains Hernández.

The play, which follows the lives of Cowen and Johnson from the time of their meeting in 1957 until Cowen’s suicide, digs into the often avoided themes of abortion, female sex life and being lesbian. Hernández points out, “When Kerouac, Ginsberg or Burroughs talked about homosexuality, they referred exclusively to male homosexuality, and it didn’t even occur to them that the same phenomenon was experienced by women. And it was the same story when those men talked about free love and the sexual revolution – they didn’t extend the concepts to women. What is clear is that women, too, desired these things, although very few of them dared express their thoughts aloud. And those who did were lost along the way, like Cowen.”

The performance is a compilation of poetry, dialogues, and live music, and the characters are played by Sara Gómez and Esther Vega. It is structured like a cabaret, and each scene of the performance is based on a poem written by a Beat woman.