Rebelling Down the Produce Aisle

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Rebelling Down The Produce Aisle In “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg, the poet describes a fictitious encounter between himself and the poets Walt Whitman and García Lorca in a California supermarket. Widely known for his outspoken views against sexual oppression, Ginsberg uses an everyday setting of a grocery store to illustrate the inequality which exists between people with different sexual orientations and the effect it has on them. Ginsberg, a homosexual, first introduces Whitman when he is strolling to the supermarket to satisfy his hunger pains. Whitman, one of the most influential poets in American literature, was known for his controversial work and he was thought to be either homosexual or bisexual (Selby 126). Ginsberg tells with excitement about the husbands, wives and babies who are shopping together as families. In opposition to the families, Ginsberg introduces Lorca, another deceased homosexual poet (Ginsberg 1290). Through the juxtaposition of the happy families against Lorca, who is standing alone by himself, the poet emphasizes the isolation which homosexuals experienced during the 1960s and prior (Newman). The poet attempts to highlight the views of a different sexual orientation by using two homosexual poets in his poem. Ginsberg refers to Whitman as “childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys” (Ginsberg 1290). He is sarcastically conveying groundless and discriminating notions of the time that homosexuals do not contribute to society because they cannot reproduce and that they are perverted. He thinks he is being followed by the store detective. At the time when the poem was written, all states had sodomy laws which made homosexual acts illegal in the United States

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