Gay Sunrise: Writing Gay Liberation in San Francisco 1968-1974

Note location: Dog Eared Books - 489 Castro Street, SF, CA 94114

The Green Arcade and Ithuriel’s Spear Present Gay Sunrise, with editor James Mitchell and contributors Bruce Boone and Bob Glück.

Gay Sunrise is a collection of work by 32 writers and artists published originally by the Hoddypoll Press, a San Francisco small press cheerfully agitating for gay liberation as early as 1968. The book insists that advancing the dual gay lib imperatives—gay is good and we all must come out right now—started in San Francisco's gay hippie era well before Stonewall. Gay cultural historian Gregory Woods writes: "This is a terrific anthology, bursting with juicy verse and prose. It's cheerful and tearful, innocently dirty, and richly evocative of a time of great energy and hope." Kevin Killian reminds that "Gay Sunrise brings us the work of many San Francisco based poets (and a few celebrated outliers, like Ginsberg and Giorno) who wrote frankly about gay male sexuality in a time when to do so was quite dangerous," while Eric Sneathen enthuses that "charming, erotic, delightful, Gay Sunrise recalls San Francisco as the epicenter of a global phenomenon of politics and aesthetic sensibility: something so new, so fragile, and so bright."