The best account of the relationship between Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky is that given by Ginsberg himself in his 1972 interview with Allen Young. It is reprinted here as a preface to the letters. (Excerpted from Gay Sunshine Interviews, vol. I, edited by Winston Leyland; Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, 1978, pp. 109-113.) Peter Orlovsky's view of the relationship is summed up well in his poem "Me and Allen."

Allen Ginsberg:

We [Peter and I] met in San Francisco. He was living with a painter named Robert LaVigne in '54. I was having a very straight life, just trying it out, working on an advertising company, wearing suits, living up on Nob Hill in a nice big apartment with Sheila, who was a jazz singer and worked in advertising. Things were somewhat unsatisfactory between us. We'd been taking a little peyote, so we were into a psychedelic scene, too.

We got into an argument, so I wandered down one night into an area of San Francisco I'd never noticed and then called Polk Gulch, now known as a notorious gay area with lots of gay bars. It was then more of a bohemian corner of Sutter and Polk, and a Foster's cafeteria. I went and sat in the Foster’s, late at night. I ran into Robert LaVigne and got into a big, interesting, artistic conversation about the New York painters I knew—Larry Rivers, de Kooning, and Kline. LaVigne was a provincial San Francisco painter, so I was bringing all sorts of fresh poetry, art news from New York.

He took me up to see his place and his paintings, about four blocks away on Gough Street in an apartment that I subsequently lived in for many seasons and still use now. I walked into the apartment and there was this enormous, beautiful, lyrical, seven-by-seven-foot-square painting of a naked boy with his legs spread, and some onions at his feet, with a little Greek embroider on the couch. He had a nice, clean-looking pecker, yellow hair, a youthful teeny little face, and a beautiful frank expression looking right out of the canvas at me. And I felt a heart throb immediately. So I asked who that was, and Robert said, “Oh, that’s Peter; he’s here, he’s home.” And then Peter walked in the room with the same look on his face, a little shyer.

Within a week Robert said that he was going out of town or breaking up with Peter, or Peter was breaking up with him. He asked me if I was interested in Peter, and he’s see what he could arrange. I said, “Ooh, don’t mock me.” I’d already given up. I already had had a historic love affair with Neal Cassady a decade earlier. So I was already a tired old god, in the sense of the defeats of love, not having made it, not having found a permanent life companion. And in 1955, I was already twenty-nine. I wasn’t a twenty-year-old kid with romantic notions. That night we were in Vesuvio’s bar. Robert had a big conversation with Peter, asking Peter if he was interested, sort of like a shachun, a matrimonial arranger.

Then I went home one night. I went to Peter’s room. We were to sleep together that night on a huge mattress he had on the floor. I took off my clothes and got into bed. I hadn’t slept with too many people. Never openly, completely giving and taking. With Jack or Neal, with people who were primarily heterosexual and who didn’t fully accept the sexualization of our tenderness, I felt I was forcing it on them; so I was always timid about them making love back to me, and they very rarely did very much. When they did, it was like blessings from heaven. If you get into it, there’s a funny kind of pleasure/pain, absolute loss/hope. When you blow someone like that and they come, it’s great! And if they touch you once, it’s enough to melt the entire life structure, as well as the heart, the genitals and the earth. And it’ll make you cry.

So... Peter turned around (he was in his big Japanese robe), opened up the bathrobe—he was naked—and put it around me and pulled me into him; and we got close, belly to belly, face to face. That was so frank, so free and so open that I think it was one of the first times that I felt open with a boy. then, emboldened, I screwed Peter. He wept afterwards, and I got frightened, not knowing what I’d done to make him cry, but completely moved by the fact that he was so involved as to weep. At the same time the domineering, sadism part of me was flattered and erotically aroused.

The reason he wept was that he realized how much he was giving me and how much I was demanding, asking and taking. I think he wept looking at himself in that position not knowing how he’d gotten there; not feeling it was wrong, but wondering at the strangeness of it. The most raw meat of reasons, for weeping.

Then Robert hearing, seeing the situation, came in to comfort Peter a little bit. I was very possessive and I pushed Robert away. That got me and Robert into a funny kind of distrust that lasted for a year or two before our karmas finally resolved. He then realized he was well off on his own; and I was burdened with the karma of love.

Peter was primarily heterosexual, and always was. I guess that was another reason he was shocked—the heaviness of my sadistic possessiveness in screwing him. For the first time in my life I really had an opportunity to screw somebody else! I think that wounded him and thrilled me a little bit. so we still had to work out all that in our relationship over many, many years. It’s painful sometimes.

We slept together perhaps one more time. Then I had to go to New York for my brother’s wedding at Christmas, ’54. I came back and moved into that apartment where they were living, at their invitation. And then there was a triangle of Robert, me and Peter. Peter had not made up his mind whether or not he wanted to make a more permanent relationship with me. I had my eyes on Peter for life-long love; [I was] completely enamored and intoxicated—just the right person for me, I thought. Robert was not sure he hadn’t make a mistake, seeing the flow and the vitality that was rising up in both me and Peter. And Peter began with drawing. He was caught in this rivalry between me and Robert, and, at the same time, there was his unsurety of me and his relation to me. Basically he liked girls anyway, so what was he doing lying there being screwed by me?

So I moved across from the Hotel Wentley and got a room. I was working in a market research job. I had the brilliant inspiration that the categorizing and market research I was doing could be fed into a machine, and I wouldn’t have to add all those columns anymore. So I supervised the transfer for the company, and that left me out of a job just nicely, like a seamless occlusion. Then I got unemployment compensation.

I was being psychoanalyzed at Langley Porter Clinic, an elite extension of U.C. Berkeley Medical School. He was a very good doctor, and I said: “You know, I’m very hesitant to get into a deep thing with Peter, because where can it ever lead. Maybe I’ll grow old and then Peter probably won’t love me—just a transient relationship. Besides, shouldn’t I be heterosexual?” He said, “Why don’t you do what you want. What would you like to do?” And I answered, “Well, I really would just love to get an apartment on Montgomery Street, stop working and live with Peter and write poems!” He said, “Why don’t you do that?” So I said, “What happens if I get old or something?” And he replied, “Oh, you’re a nice person; there’s always people who will like you”—which really amazed me. So, in a sense he gave me permission to be free, not to worry about consequences.

So then I waited for Peter and Peter stayed up at the Gough Street apartment and went to school. I got this room and started writing a lot and waited and waited for Peter. Neal Cassady came by a couple f times. I made it with Neal. I can remember one of the last really wild times I made it with him, because I had a room of my own and there was privacy, finally. He was lying there naked, and I was sitting on his sock, jumping up and down trying to make him come.

And I just waited and waited [for Peter]. There was nothing I could run after or pursue, because I couldn’t claim anything by force. Things got too difficult where Peter was living, so he got a room himself in the Wentley, across the street from where I was. And there was embarrassment, coldness—not knowing where each other was, what we would do. I was waiting for him to make some sort of decision. A couple of times we drank a little to see if we could get over the low. We didn’t sleep together at all, though I was longing to.

Then one day he was lying in bed, and he started crying again. He said, “Come on and take me.” I was too overwhelmed and frightened to even get a hard-on. I didn’t know what to do. We both had our clothes on. I was afraid he was interpreting it was me screwing him again, rather than really just having each other. But that soon got resolved, and we moved in together, into an apartment in North Beach. We found an apartment, and it had a room for him, a room for me, and a hall between us; and a kitchen together. So that gave us both a little privacy, and, at the same time, we could make it when we wanted.

He was very moody, very sweet, tender, gentle and open. But every month or two months he’d go into a very dark, Russian, Dostoevskian black mood and lock himself in his room and weep for days; and then he’d come out totally cheerful and friendly. I found after a while it was best not to interrupt him, not to hang round like a vulture; let him go through his own yoga.

The key thing was when we decided on the terms of our marriage—I think it was in Foster’s cafeteria downtown about three in the morning. We were sitting and talking about each other, with each other, trying to figure out what we were going to do, who we were to each other, and what we wanted out of each other, how much I loved him, and how much did he love me. We arrived at what we both really desired.

I’d already had a visionary experience: an illumined audition of Blake’s voice and a sense of epiphany about the universe. He had had an experience, weeping and lonesome, walking up the hill to his college, and having a sense of an apparition of the trees bowing to him. So we both had some kind of psychedelic, transcendental, mystical image in our brains and hearts.

We made a vow to each other that he could own me, my mind and everything I knew, and my body, and I could own him and all he knew and all his body; and that we would give each other ourselves, so that we possessed each other as property, to do everything we wanted to, sexually or intellectually, and in a sense explore each other until we reached the mystical “X” together, emerging two merged souls. We had the understanding that when our (my particularly) erotic desire was ultimately satisfied by being satiated (rather than being denied), there would be a lessening of desire, grasp. holding on, craving and attachment; and that ultimately we would both be delivered free in heaven together. And so the vow was that neither of us would go into heaven unless we could get the other one in—like a mutual Bodhisattva’s vow.

That’s actually the Bodhisattva’s vow—“Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to enlighten them all. Passions are numberless, I vow to quench them all, cut them all down. The nature of the dharma, the doors of nature are endless, I vow to enter every single one of them. Buddha path very high and low and endless—vow to follow through all the way—Buddha path, infinite, limitless, vow to go all the way through.” Sentient beings, numberless, unnumbered—countless, vow to count every one, enlighten every single one of them. Basically a vow to be reborn as everybody, one after another, every stone, every leaf blade, vow to be every individual part of the universe at one time or another, and accept the fate of that particle, so to speak.

Well, this is like a limited version of that, almost intuitive, the vow to stay with each other to whatever eternal consciousness: him with his trees bowing, me with Blake eternity vision. I was more intellectual, so I was offering my mind, my intellect; he was more athletic and physical and was offering his body. So we held hands, took a vow: I do, I do, you promise? yes, I do. At that instant we looked in each other’s eyes and there was a kind of celestial fire that crept over us and blazed up and illuminated the entire cafeteria and made it an eternal place.

I found somebody who’d accept my devotion, and he found somebody who’d accept his devotion and who was devoted to him. It was really a fulfillment of fantasy, to a point where fantasy and reality finally merged. Desire illuminated the room, because it was a fulfillment of all my fantasies since I was nine, when I began to have erotic love fantasies. And tht vow has stuck as the primary core of our relationship. That’s the mutual consciousness; it’s the celestial social contact, valid because it was an expression of the desire of that time, and it was workable. It’s really the basic human relationship—you give yourself to each other, help each other and don’t go to heaven without each other.

There’s this mythology of Arjun, from the Bhagavad Gita, getting to the door of heaven. he’s got this little dog following him, and they say, you can come in but you can’t bring your dog. And he says, well, no, if I can’t go in with my dog, I won’t go. And then they say, Oh, come on, you can go in, just leave him behind, it’s only a dog. And he says, no, I love my dog, and I trust that love, and if I can’t bring that trust in, then what kind of heaven is this? And the third time, he says, no, no, no, I’ll stay out and put the dog in heaven but I won’t go in without the dog. I vowed to tears with my dog, I can’t leave my dog alone. And so, finally, after the third time, the dog turns out to be Krishna, the supreme lord of the universe and heaven itself. he was only trying to get heaven into heaven. And his instinct was right. And ur instinct was right. it was enough to bring us through very difficult times—all through the change of status, beat generation and fame, the alteration of social identity that fame entails.

Our relationship has lasted from 1954 on. The terms have changed tremendously. Peter has gone through a lot of changes, and we’ve separated for a year at a time. And always come back. We’ve gone through a lot of phases of sleeping with people together, doing orgies together, sleeping alone together. Now Peter sleeps with a girl. I very rarely sleep with him. But the origin of our relationship is a fond affection. I wouldn’t want to go to heaven and leave Peter alone on earth; and he wouldn’t leave me alone if I was sick in bed, dying, gray-haired, wormy, rheumatic. He’d have pity on me. We’ve maintained our relationship so long that at this point we could separate and it would be all right. I think the karma has resolved and worn out in a sense.

The original premise was to have each other and possess each other until the karma was worn out, until the desire, the neurotic attachment, was satisfied by satiation. And there’s been satiation, disappointment and madness, because he went through a long period of speed freakery in the mid sixties which really strained things. We had times of hostile screaming at each other such as happens in the worst of homo- and heterosexual marriages, where people have murder in their hearts toward each other. That burned out a lot of the false emotion of youth, and the unrealistic graspings, cravings, and attachments and dependencies. So he’s now independent, and I’m independent of him. And yet there’s an independent curiosity between us.