Not long after meeting Carr, Ginsberg wrote to his brother and said, "I plan to go down to Greenwich Village with a friend of mine who claims to be an intellectual, and knows queer and interesting people. I plan to get drunk, if I can" (Hyde, 89).

It was while Ginsberg was attending Columbia University that he realized, for the first time as an adult, his sexual orientation as a homosexual. In a letter to his brother Eugene, Allen stated that he had "accumulated a modest number of close friends, some neurotic, some insane, some political." He placed these friends in categories of social standing -- "the madmen and artists from Greenwich Village and Columbia," such as Kerouac and Carr; the "sensitive youths and young intellectuals," mostly composed of his "normal" classmates at school, and lastly, a group of other classmates whom he had daily contact with, such as his...
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