United Kingdom
Leon Horton is a writer, interviewer and editor specialising in arts and literature. His writing has been published by Beatdom Books, International Times, Beat Scene Magazine, Under the Counterculture, Newington Blue Press, Literary Heist, Empty Mirror, Erotic Review and TheGayUK. In January 2019, he became a member of the European Beat Studies Network, an academic community of scholars, writers and artists concerned with studying the Beat Generation literary movement.
David S. Wills is the founder and editor of Beatdom Books and the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' (2013), Crossing India the Hard Way (2018) and World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller (2019). His latest work High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism, an in-depth analysis of...
Charles Bukowski, like most writers, was never happier than when he was alone at the typewriter; beer-in-hand, glugging into the night, hiding in plain language. But writers, especially poets, can rarely afford to let their work speak for itself. Dragged from their caves into the tyranny of the light, they are often pushed into the...
Jack Kerouac with Al Hinkle, San Francisco, 1952. Photo courtesy of Gerald Nicosia. You would have to be dead or in a coma to have missed the fact that March 12, 2022, marked the centenary of the birth of writer and lonesome traveller Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road.
This article is respectfully dedicated to my friend Paul Clements (1964-2017), another good Doctor sorely missed. Owl Farm, Colorado, February 20, 2005 - 5:42 p.m. Hunter S. Thompson, hell-raiser and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, takes a phone call from his wife Anita at the Aspen Club and apologises for almost accidentally...
It was summer 1991, I think, when sharing a joint on a brick fire escape after a night of acid-tapped cartoon lunacy, my friend Steve exhaled smoke into the Manchester morning and casually asked if I'd heard of a writer called William Burroughs.
At the height of his short-lived fame, Joe Orton - anarchic playwright and cause célèbre of the English theatre - is found murdered at 25 Noel Road, Islington, his brains bashed in by his long-term lover and one-time collaborator Kenneth Halliwell.
Poet, publisher, teacher, painter... actor, musician, social commentator - Jeff Nuttall was a polymath and a pioneer, an anarchist sympathiser who grew up in the shadow of the atomic bomb, a jazz trumpeter who blew the changes of the 1960s.
It's a philosophical question often posed, but if you could, would you want to live forever? What if, barring accidents, you could cheat death? Swap diseased organs for healthy ones, dead brain cells for future memories? For the vast majority of us death is just a fact of life, but to some it is simply a challenge to be surmounted.
Exit my back door at speed (so many have), turn left, hotfoot it past the school, take another left and slide on down to the nature reserve... and you'll find yourself at a gay cruising area.
"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it." - Edward L. Bernays, PR guru (1891-1995) Vile comments, outright lies, slanderous leaks...