Yesterday's item about radio yakker Michael Savage and his dismissal of autism as "an overdiagnosed medical condition" jarred our memories a bit. Wasn't there something unusual, something uncharacteristic about him that we had discussed before? In fact, there was, and we wrote about it way back in our September issue of 2003! Seems that Savage (aka Michael Weiner) was once a close friend and pen-pal of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It took a search of the Howl author's collected letters at Stanford University to discover just how close:

March 8, 1970

Dear Allen:

After speaking to you on the phone about how nice the black-white thing is in mountain villages in Fiji, I walked downstairs to the school courtyard, where a little-known black brother looks at me, takes my hand gently, we do some old-world Lower East Side finger tricks, and he peacefully kisses the back of my hand—I do the same for his hand. I told him about our brief talk, and he says, "I must have felt the vibes."

Michael Weiner
Botany Dept.
University of Hawaii
Honolulu, HI

Now, the dope-smoking, boy-loving grand dame of '60s degeneracy didn't seem like the kind of riffraff a nationally renowned homophobic zealot would have on his buddy list. But we shouldn't have been so surprised. In Savage's thinly veiled confessional novel Vital Signs, the protagonist admits he is allured by "masculine beauty," saying, "I choose to override my desires for men when they swell in me, waiting out the passions like a storm, below decks." More intriguing is the reported existence of a picture of Savage and Ginsberg swimming naked together in Fiji. These days, of course, Savage is more prone to saying, "The gay and lesbian mafia wants our children!" Ah, the innocence of youth.