Jack and Neal were Both Hot
“Jack was handsome…really he was a hunk, a football star, and a klutz.” “Jack was a big, athletic man, and Neal was very muscular. ” “Jack was always making faces and using funny voices…he was a cutup. But he was also down in the dumps a lot…self-conscious, and terribly shy. That was of course one thing he admired about Neal—Neal was so swift and graceful.”
Carolyn Cassady, former wife of Neal, and lover of Jack’s
Neal Opens Door Stark Naked
The inspiration for On the Road had begun when Neal Cassady stepped into Jack’s life, opening the door of an East Harlem apartment stark naked in early 1947. Over the next three years, Jack’s solo hitchhiking adventures and epic transcontinental drives with Neal continued, and the two engaged in a voluminous correspondence whenever they were apart, recounting the events of their hectic lives and revealing their deepest thoughts to each other. [Kerouac described Neal Cassady on their first meeting as “a side-burned hero of the snowy West.”]
Joyce Johnson, A Kerouac editor, biographer and lover,
My Desire To See You Again”
Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady kept in touch through letters, one of which written in 1948, is an intimate account of Kerouac’s dreams for his future and his excitement to realize them with Cassady as his partner in crime. The topic of the letter bounces around from page to page, switching rapidly from a half-baked plan to buy a ranch to expressions of admiration and love. “There is nothing clearer in my mind than my desire to see you again,” Kerouac writes. * A Match for Jack…Opposites Attract/ * In many ways, the two couldn’t have been more different. Neal was a hustler from an early age, but also a voracious reader of Proust, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, with dreams of being a writer and intellectual. “Jack had a formal education, which Neal envied, but intellectually he was more than a match for Jack, and they enjoyed long discussions on every subject.” “They each had what the other wanted,” says Carolyn. “It made them admire each other more.” “Jack was the observer, Neal the actor. Opposites attract.”
“We’re Strangely Connected”
In his 1950-1952 letters to Cassady, written when Jack was in his late twenties and hopelessly smitten with Neal, he composed a plea for love. In his January 10, 1951, letter, Kerouac begged Cassady to recognize how “strangely connected” they were. - Amburn/ * “I Know I’m Bisexual” “I can’t promise a darn thing, I know I’m bisexual, but prefer women, there’s a slimmer line than you think between my attitude toward love and yours, don’t be so concerned, it’ll fall into line. Beyond that – who knows? Let’s try it & see, huh? … “.
Neal Cassady in letter to Allen Ginsberg, April 10, 1947
"Splatter My Come At You” *
In 1948, in a single letter, Cassidy announced the birth of his daughter, proclaimed how he worshiped “…sex – yes, all; all, sex”; and asked Ginsberg if he could “splatter my come at you…” More dryly, Ginsberg instructed Cassidy to send some of that come “…so i know you’re sincere.”–
Catharine Stimpson, The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual Liberation,
“As everybody knows, I fucked Kerouac,” said Gore Vidal in a 1994 interview. Vidal noted that almost everything that happened that night [August 23, 1953] except for graphic descriptions of sex, were described almost word for word in Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans. “I said I was heading uptown…but Jack had other ideas.’: ‘Let’s go get a room around here.’ The first law of sex is never go to bed with a drunk. I was twenty-eight. Jack was thirty-one. Lust aside, we both thought, even then (this was before On the Road), that we owed it to literary history to couple.”–
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