I’d spread my wings and soared, found undreamed of freedom and acceptance, and then plummeted into the depths of my darkest nightmare.
1967: my 17th year, my Summer of Love.
From puberty to adolescence, my little-town classmates had bullied and beat me up for being odd. With the advent of the hippie movement, things changed: unconventionality was now in vogue. My three-week visit to San Francisco confirmed a great truth; a deviant need not be a persona non grata; being different also means being unique. It’s all about finding the right market. Three weeks of love and peace, sex and drugs, sit-ins and be-ins: The City was my Xanadu, a place where I could be who and what I was without self-restraint or shame. My peculiarities became my major assets.
Returning home with the certainty life offered more than taunts and ill-treatment, I inadvertently landed in the brutal confines of the Los Angeles juvenile detention center: a holding-place for teenage rapists, murderers, drug addicts, and runaways. An ordeal for someone of straight majority, a hellhole for a young queer.
But the hope I’d gained in San Francisco continued to shine even in those dark hours and inspired me to make a decision that would change my life.
Although Peace, Love, Incarceration is a memoir in genre, it is also a soul-searching narrative of my attempt to discover what makes a man a man, to find logic in man’s inhumanity to his own kind in war and peace, and discovering a way of dealing with social constraints and mores of a macho oriented society in the America of the1950s and 1960s.
Seen through the eyes of a gay man, the principles within the story are universal and apply to anyone who survived puberty.