In All The Silent Manliness

The journey to gay freedom began on roads and at airports all across America and around the world. It was time to go someplace and “be gay”. The problem was some of us didn’t know what we were supposed to do differently. The only way to be gay most of us had ever known was to be silent, invisible, insecure and scared.

People with cameras still roam San Francisco’s Castro Street. They’re trying to capture something that is no longer there. They yearn to feel, not only the jubilance of a young gay community partying hard, But sadly, to also share the growing pains, the tragedy and the deaths that were a part of our life and times.

The gay awaking of the 1960’s and 70’s was only part of a time of great social change. Thousands of Americans were dying in a needless, hopeless war. Simmering racial tensions erupted in Detroit in the biggest riot in US history, and young Americans, fed up with an unresponsive, corrupt government, and empowered by a summer of love, stepped out in front to change things.

For us it was a time when we discovered we didn’t need anyone’s approval to our lives in the open. My book is only one story. There are thousands of others.
Come, go back in time with me as I make the 1970’s come alive and take you on an incredible journey that saved my life, but ended thousands of others.

Illustrated with 60 photographs of the period, most from the author’s private collection.