“We’re so postmodern we’re traditional.”
—John L
A beamo—a postmodern beat, lives his life as a continuous series of social experiments and engages in battles of wit for pure amusement. Aside from their intense social and artistic pursuits, the beats were notorious for being art. Note first that most of the beats were gay themselves—so it’s not too much of a stretch. The beats claimed things like: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” If this statement applies to you or people you know, you are probably a beamo. Beamos care little about how they are dressed except when they are in costume. Beamos pretend to care little about what people think, but are actually crafting a purposeful devil-may-care artiface. They may be poets, playrights, chefs, sex workers, or artists of any kind, but more likely than not they make their everyday lives into art. They can argue continuously about anything and everything with an intense yet playful verbal thrust and parry, no matter how disgusting or venomous: all is poetry.
A Beamo is not a hipster. Hipsters care only about the artifice, and not about the substance behind it. They make the trends trends, but never actually start them. They are a demographic, while the beamos are the sparks that cause the fire. Remember: there were only six actual beats: Allen Ginsberg (gay), William Burroughs (gay), Jack Kerouac (straight), Neal Cassidy (gay), Greg Corso (pretty straight), and Herbet Huncke (gay)—everyone else was what would now be called a hipster. See a pattern here?
Beamos do not give even one shit, let alone two, about normalized tastes and revel in flouting convention. They are given to heavy drug use, sexcapades, and all manner of experimentation. They probably hang out at one of the dirtiest and darkest bars in town—or at a friend’s place—and are deemed social outlaws. When seen in public, they are immediately noticeable by their non-fashions or post-fashions and intensity of being alive. They are burning with aliveness. Everything they do is art. However, when hanging out with these people—assuming it is possible to gain their bemusement, make sure you are ready to do drugs and fuck all of them at some point. If you are not ready to relieve yourself of all personal boundaries: steer clear. If you are not ready to discover and live out your darkest inclinations: steer clear. If you are interested in meeting a nice boy, settling down, and having uninteresting buttsex for the rest of your life, then do meet these folks—they’ll set you on a far more interesting path.
It is, of course, worth noting that beamos must be young. In their latter years they seamlessly transition into being a Dobo or domesticated bohemian. As Tom Hodgkinson describes it in The Freedom Manifesto “The Dobo has a wild past but now has a family. He or she is occasionally given, however, to a night of hedonism. The wildness is still in there.”
[Tags] gay gay social spectrum beamos
