found in feminist

[novapsyche]

This episode is one of the many contradictions in [Andrea] Dworkin's life. Another is her friendship with the poet and gay liberationist Allen Ginsberg. "To me he was like a god," she says. "I plucked up the courage to visit him after we met at an event. He told me over and over again as I was leaving, 'I love you, I love you.' It was very strange."

Dworkin and Ginsberg ended up sharing a godson. In Heartbreak, she describes the confrontation that turned them into sworn enemies. On the day of their godson's barmitzvah, child pornography was criminalised by the supreme court. Dworkin was delighted, but knew that Ginsberg had problems with the legislation.

"Ginsberg told me he had never met an intelligent person who had the ideas I did," she writes. "I told him he didn't get around enough. He said, 'The right wants to put me in jail.' I said, 'Yes, they're very sentimental; I'd kill you.'" When I repeat this story to her, she chuckles, and says in her slow, throaty way, "Oh good, I love that. Don't worry, you can print it now, he is very dead." (Ginsberg died in 1997).

A life without compromise