Jack Kerouac's Long and Winding Road Trip: The Revolutionary 1957 Travel Memoir on the Road Ignited a Generation and Flung Open the Floodgates of Hip "Otherness." at Its Core Is a Heartbreaking and Oblique Queer Romance

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Jack Kerouac's famed coming-of-age travel novel--and subtextual gay love story--On the Road turned 50 last year. The pioneering book traces the journeys the author took across America by bus and car both alone and with his best friend and inspiration, the bisexual hustler, con artist, and raconteur Heal Cassady.

Even at the time of the book's publication in 1957, the novel's stream-of-consciousness, balls-to-the-wall style and its focus on the socially marginalized (hobos, intellectuals, gay hustlers) gained the matinee idol-handsome Kerouac (1922-1969) a dedicated following of readers hungry for an icon of "otherness." All of a sudden it was cool to be "beat," a term Kerouac had lifted from his friend Herbert Huncke, a gay hustler in Times Square. "I'm beat," Huncke uttered to his friend, defining it as being down and out, humbled by life. Kerouac took the word and elevated it to mean "beatific," enraptured by life. "It involves a sort of nakedness of mind and, ultimately, of soul, a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness," Kerouac explained.

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