‘Jimmy Berman’: Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan’s bold anthem for the gay liberation movement
The first three songs on Allen Ginsberg’s First Blues album come from a November 1971 session for a planned release on the Beatles’ Apple Records.
At the time, Ginsberg asked Bob Dylan to lead the band, which included Ginsberg’s lover Peter Orlovsky, Greenwich Village folkies Happy and Artie Traum, composer David Amram, and guitarist Jon Sholle. Dylan himself played guitar, piano and organ.
“I first met Bob at a party at the Eighth Street Book Shop, and he invited me to go on tour with him,” Ginsberg once recalled of his relationship with Dylan. “I ended up not going, but, boy, if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have gone like a flash. He’d probably have put me onstage with him.”
“His image was undercurrent, underground, unconscious in people,” Ginsberg continued. “Something a little more mysterious, poetic, a little more Dada, more where people’s hearts and heads actually were rather than where they ‘should be’ according to some ideological angry theory.”
A few years after this meeting, the pair would decide to enter the recording booth together. For keen fans, ‘Vomit Express’ might be the best-known product of the session. However, Ginsberg and Dylan also co-wrote a song for the gay liberation movement, which was about five minutes old at the time: ‘Jimmy Berman (Gay Lib Rag)’. I believe Ginsberg is improvising the lyrics, which concern his efforts to get an 18-year-old newsboy in the sack.
The track feels like a backroom jam at the Chelsea Hotel, circa 1971, equal parts lust, camp, and chaos. Ginsberg croons like a horny Whitman on poppers while Dylan noodles in the background like he’s scoring a B-movie about gay Marxist angels. It’s glorious.
What makes it so compelling isn’t just the gonzo poetry or the fact that Dylan—a man hardly known for sharing the mic—lets Ginsberg steal the spotlight. It’s the rawness, the utter lack of filter. This was pre-Stonewall gay liberation still finding its voice, and here were two titans of the counterculture kicking open a closet door in song, long before it was fashionable or marketable to do so. ‘Jimmy Berman’ might be a joke, but it’s not a punchline—it’s a snapshot of a cultural moment too weird and too real to exist today. This wasn’t a protest anthem. It was a filthy, fearless whisper from the underground.
Listen to the track below and sing along with Allen, discouraging any homophobic and heteronormative attitudes within earshot.