For revolutionaries, there can be no joy without continually transgressing boundaries, so of course sexual revolutionaries had to come for the children.
Readers of a certain age will remember the famous poets of the 1950s “Beat Generation,” such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, author of the poem “Howl,” once (perhaps still?) a staple on American Literature courses.
More associated with the university scene than the others, Ginsberg was in the forefront of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution, which culminated in the hijacking by the intelligentsia of public discourse on cultural issues. This was the movement that inspired Senator Daniel Moynihan’s famous phrase, “defining deviancy down,” to describe the process in which we change the meaning of morality to fit what we are drawn to do and intend to do anyway.
