People talk about “homophobia within the black community,” but the Congressional Black Caucus is virtually unanimous on almost every bill seeking to protect the civil rights of LGBT Americans. We want an end to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression in jobs, housing, public accommodations, and marriage. Compared to almost any other subgroup in Congress, the LGBT community has a champion in the Black Caucus.

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Where some of the old levees were built with dredged mud and shell fill that washed away in the storm, the new ones are toughened with clay. Many old flood walls were shaped, in cross section, like the letter I and stood on muddy soil that seemed almost eager to give way; most of the new work is sturdier, shaped like an inverted T and braced with pilings driven diagonally into the ground. The corps is strengthening some soil, by mixing cement deep into the ground.

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But you don’t really need to know most of this to play the young Ginsberg. Young Ginsberg—the Ginsberg who went to Columbia, whose work was read by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, who was kicked out of college (and institutionalized) in part because he was gay—is not a familiar character. Everyone has an image of the large-bellied, bearded, balding Buddha figure that Ginsberg became. But to play the young Ginsberg, you, the actor, must be slim and clean-shaven and must dye your hair black—your full head of hair. You must wear thick-framed glasses. You must apply prostheses to your ears to make them stick out.

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“Morally, what he teaches is to be accepting, to be generous, unselfish; to refuse to reject anyone else’s suffering, or pain, or joy either; to not fear sex, to revel in it, all of it, every permutation of it; to desire desire, to not mistrust the demands of the body. . . . He wants us not to be afraid of ourselves, even of our dark, darkest, most doubting selves. . . . To be tender with the young, to admire the old, to fear neither age nor death, to exalt in them both.”

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