Kerouac explored gender, sexuality, and queerness openly in his work during a time when to do so was very rare Holly George-Warren, Kerouac biographer Moreover, sixty-five years since publication, the misogyny of On the Road looks overt, even gleeful: Moriarty’s “awfully dumb” 16-year-old wife Marylou is instructed “to make breakfast and sweep the floor” within the first three pages. Kerouac himself was a white, university-educated man who returned from his travels to have his meals cooked and his washing done by his mother. His alter ego Sal Paradise may have been inspired by his time working on a farm in California, for example, but he always had the option of returning home, or of being sent money by his aunt. To some, he is an aspirational iconoclast to others he is the face of white male privilege. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardianīut insofar as Kerouac is invoked as a symbol, his meaning is not uniformly understood. An enduring brand … Christian Dior’s Kerouac sweatshirt, on a catwalk printed with the first draft of On the Road.
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