American Poet Allen Ginsberg in Prague
He was the unhinhibited, free-wheeling, and very gay 'King of May'....
BERLIN (February 24, 2025) — This month, the city came alive with the Berlinale, the Berlin Film Festival.
At another year’s Berlinale, I went to a party where I met Stefan — a tall, elderly Czech film producer. With drink in hand, Stefen entertained me for as long as an hour with his stories about being a young person in Prague during the early years of the Cold War — especially in 1965, when he suddenly found himself as a Czech comrade to the legendary American “beat” poet, Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997).
Stefan told me he’d turned eighteen that year, an eyes-wide student growing up in communist Czechoslovakia — in the beautiful capital city, Prague (which is also the historic capital of Bohemia). There, as a young student, Stefan unexpectedly found himself face-to-face with one of the most intrepid and flamboyant American poets of all time.
As if through divine intervention — on a cloud of marijuana smoke, perhaps — the thirty-something Ginsberg had flown into the lives of Stefan and his pals exactly at the start of Prague’s annual May Day celebration. Spontaneously jumping into the fun, the uninhibited- and unabashedly gay Ginsberg joined his astonished Czech counterparts as a contender for the spring festival’s title, the “King of May.” (This was the lucky citizen who, each year, bravely bore both scepter and crown and waved to the crowd from the deck of the annual festival float.)
Being handed the shining ‘bling’ of office, one of America’s most high-profile “beatnik” artists became a temporary border-crossing Cold War king in Prague. [That generation of distinctly non-global Americans would likely never have heard- (nor read) a word about this cultural event on television, nor read about it in their newspapers; no more than East European audiences would have heard anything about this “deeply embarrassing incident” on their side of Cold War divide.]
Ginsberg’s now-famous work, ‘King of May,’ voices sympathy with the Czech students whom he’d met; also his opposition to the totalitarian regime that oppressed them….
In the brief but expressive party that followed Ginsberg’s coronation, revelers paraded him through town. The American poet happily waved to bemused and befuddled onlookers — before opening his mouth widely and loudly enough to “win” his ticket home. As ever, Ginsberg spoke outrageous and defyingly offensive truths to those in power — to the predominantly hetero-male authorities on both sides of the Cold War barrier. The Czechs responded by giving the strange American a suitable winged exit to his spontaneous, theatrical art-trip….