It was the poem that defined a generation. "Howl," the defiantly gay manifesto that Allen Ginsberg read aloud for the first time at a Six Gallery public reading in San Francisco in 1955, railed against the life-snuffing hetero-oppressive conformity of the 1950s. Filled with anger and rage, "Howl" bemoans the causes of addiction as it simultaneously celebrates Walt Whitman, Ginsberg's Beat Generation comrades, cum, Bach, jazz and jism, the Bible, and a litany of transgressive acts. Hearing it read aloud by Ginsberg, in a voice in which heartbreak and fury intermingle, is an experience like no other. That the poem's coming out party, so to speak, came just a few months after the somewhat closeted Leonard Bernstein's 40-minute opera,