“What is it now, that a well-dressed man who is a plumber in the Plumber’s Union by day, and a beat-dressed man who is a retired barber meet on the street and think of each other wrong, as the law, or panhandler, or some such cubbyhole identification, worse than that, things like homosexual, or dopefiend, or dope pusher, or mugger, or even Communist and look away from each other’s eyes with great tense movements of thier neck muscles at the moment when their eyes are about to meet in the normal way that eyes meet on the street. . . . Looking at a man in the eye is now queer. Why else should you be looking a m. in the e.”

—Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody, 1972.