This pretty much sums up the Beat as I knew it:

"[On the Road] is not about hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists, rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the nineteen sixties. And the book is not an anti-intellectual celebration of spontaneity or an artifact of literary primitivism. It's a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure. It's also a story about guys who want to be with other guys."

--"Drive, He Wrote: What the Beats were about" by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, Oct. 1, 2007

(the article also has a nice section on the homoerotic tension that was most often realized through girlfriend swapping)