Andy Warhol. Robert Rauschenberg. Jasper Johns. William S. Burroughs. John Giorno, the poet and performance artist, slept with them all. These romantic connections were sometimes ‘transcendent’ (Giorno’s words), of a piece with his lifelong commitment to Buddhism; sometimes, he found himself awed by the personality of the great artist.
But it was all, as Giorno recounts in his posthumously released memoir Great Demon Kings, deeply joyful: passionate embraces, urgent disrobing, and hot, ecstatic love-making. Of course, John Giorno, who died at the age of 82 in late 2019, was much more than the sum of his sexual conquests.
