Saw the movie "Howl." Although I think Allen Ginsberg is overrated as a poet, and became a self-styled pop culture star, the movie successfully portrays him as someone who is labeled "crazy" by the dominant culture because he dares to speak his vision of the truth. He comes across as an earnest, striving, poet trying to articulate his thoughts.
He was a young man at a time when homosexuality was considered a mental illness. He endured institutionalization and got out when he convinced the psychiatrists that he would try to become heterosexual.
He was adept at playing the games. Like Foucault he questioned "the authorities' version of reality" against his own.
