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Homosexuality, Murder, and the Beats

Over at The Daily Caller, Mark Judge reports what may be the latest bit of Hollywood revisionism. In 1944, Lucien Carr—a 21 year-old Columbia University student and friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—killed David Kammerer with a pocketknife and dumped his body in the Hudson. In the film Kill Your Darlings, which came out last […]

Over at The Daily Caller, Mark Judge reports what may be the latest bit of Hollywood revisionism.

In 1944, Lucien Carr—a 21 year-old Columbia University student and friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—killed David Kammerer with a pocketknife and dumped his body in the Hudson. In the film Kill Your Darlings, which came out last year and was billed as “a true story of friendship, love and murder,” Kammerer’s murder is presented as the result of Carr’s conflicted homosexuality and the stigma attached to homosexuals at the time.

According to Carr’s son, however, this is false. He tells Judge that his father killed Kammerer, who was 14 years older than Carr, because the older man had abused his father as a youth and continued to make unwanted advances. (Kammerer first met Carr when Carr was twelve.)

The version of events presented in the film, Carr writes, was invented by Allen Ginsberg:

[I]t was this heavy crush, intellectual as well as romantic, that Allen developed on my father — which would endure for the whole of their lives, though it was never made physical — that led Allen to develop the deliberately distorted version of the murder story that he periodically propagated in an attempt to (successfully) injure my father as retribution for his failure to return Allen’s affections.

Read the rest.

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