GREAT DEMON KINGS

The ultimate scenester of midcentury Manhattan, lover to a who’s who of gay artists and writers, tells all in a posthumous memoir.

Giorno (1936-2019) made his first major appearance on the American cultural landscape in Andy Warhol’s 320-minute movie of Giorno’s slumbering face, Sleep (1964). This memoir is also overlong, but the author has plenty of interesting stories to tell. He quickly dispenses with his privileged childhood, though we do hear about his first poem, written during his sophomore year in high school: “I was like a baby Olympic athlete going over the high bar for the first time.” Giorno graduated from Columbia in 1958, bursting with self-confidence. “I was young and beautiful and that got me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex,” he writes, and proceeds to share an abundance of graphic detail. Andy Warhol never really enjoyed it, and his wig got in the way at key points, but Giorno found his toe-sucking “deeply moving.” A multiyear affair with Robert Rauschenberg was filled with bliss and joy and mind-blowing sex. (Rauschenberg was not looking forward to being memorialized by Giorno, but his threat to sue expired with his death.) Jasper Johns was the author’s lover during the exciting period when his Dial-A-Poem project was the hottest thing in New York City. William Burroughs was Giorno’s next great passion despite Burroughs’ small penis and his instigating a threesome with Giorno’s “nemesis,” Allen Ginsberg—and Ginsberg was everywhere. Even when the author went to India to seek enlightenment, there he was, “fat and full of ego, an embarrassing uncool dad.” After Ginsberg’s death, the author admits the two of them “did not do such a good job in this life…we will, sure as hell, continue in future lives.” If reincarnation exists, Giorno will surely document it for us.

Upbeat, funny, unsparing, and way over the top…probably a lot like the man himself.