This kind of “bro-ish” love of Kerouac can be seen as an adolescent phase. Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund in the 2012 film adaptation of On the Road. In the TV show Gilmore Girls, for example, Paris admonishes Jess for his “typical guy response” to the Beats’ drug-fuelled bromance, and, in Mad Men, the womaniser Don Draper sees Kerouac in a hallucination. His reputation is such that he is just as often invoked to signify tortured masculinity imposed on long-suffering women as he is for his pioneering writing. “He explored gender, sexuality and queerness openly in his work during a time when to do so was very rare … and he did write with deep empathy about marginalised people,” says George-Warren.Īn unqualified passion for Kerouac has nonetheless come to register as a red flag to some straight women swiping through potential partners, as a staple of “ straight male reading culture”. Readers today may find these things repellent, George-Warren acknowledges, but it is only one aspect of the complicated and often contradictory author.Īs much as Kerouac benefited from his privilege, elsewhere he rails against it. Holly George-Warren, author of a forthcoming authorised Kerouac biography, says he depicted women as “objects of the male gaze and little else”, and drew from racist tropes in “romanticising the ‘other’” – for instance when Sal and Dean see freedom in the way that Mexican people live. Kerouac explored gender, sexuality, and queerness openly in his work during a time when to do so was very rare Holly George-Warren, Kerouac biographer Moreover, sixty-five years since publication, the misogyny of On the Road looks overt, even gleeful: Moriarty’s “awfully dumb” 16-year-old wife Marylou is instructed “to make breakfast and sweep the floor” within the first three pages.
Kerouac himself was a white, university-educated man who returned from his travels to have his meals cooked and his washing done by his mother. His alter ego Sal Paradise may have been inspired by his time working on a farm in California, for example, but he always had the option of returning home, or of being sent money by his aunt. To some, he is an aspirational iconoclast to others he is the face of white male privilege. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardianīut insofar as Kerouac is invoked as a symbol, his meaning is not uniformly understood. An enduring brand … Christian Dior’s Kerouac sweatshirt, on a catwalk printed with the first draft of On the Road.
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