For Johnson to leave home, to sleep with a man on what in 1950s terms was their “first date,” at a time when birth control was imperfect if not unavailable, was to commit an “acte gratuit,” another early favored Beat term, a deliberate, decisive break with the established order. But in taking such a step, Johnson was not a candidate for glamorization, as Kerouac was when he left Columbia College in 1942 to write and hang out with drug addicts, petty thieves, and homosexual hustlers, “the Rimbauds and Verlaines of America on Times Square,” as he later called them.
