James Mitchell

Gay Sunrise James Mitchell

Poetry. Drama. Art. LGBTQIA Studies. GAY SUNRISE presents 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.