This is an unsatisfactory book, mean-spirited and inaccurate. The authors reduce the homophile (pre-Stonewall) movement, the Gay Liberation Front, and the Gay Activists Alliance to a series of petty squabbles. They utterly fail to appreciate the courage and magnanimity of the pioneers in the struggle for gay rights. They fail to convey the radical vision of GLF or the political savvy of GAA. The most important publications, activities and demonstrations are not even mentioned. People who willingly sacrificed their careers for the movement are denigrated in crass physical terms -- as "roly poly" or looking like a "string bean" or a "turtle", or having a "nasal" voice, or sounding like a "foghorn", or being "tight little-old-mannish". There are dozens and dozens of mistakes. The authors seem unaware that Morty Manford was a President of GAA. They don't know the year of the GAA fire (1974), or that GAA continued on a smaller scale for a number of years after that. Above all, the book is BORING. And whatever else you can say about the gay liberation movement of the '70s, it was not boring.

The stories and the narrative here are great and well-explained. True, the authors don't explain much about where the characters come from and just tell us that the characters are there and deal with it. Another fault here is that the authors don't really try to carry themes through the book or explain anything within a broader picture. The entire book is in the here and now and there is no big-picture thought. It's good at what it is but I wish the authors had tried to do more. Or maybe they'll write another book...

And as always, the role of San Francisco in the GLBT movement gets short shrift. In the book's foreward the authors say that's because SF has been so well-documented. Hogwash. I can name a dozen books that have beat the NYC GLBT movement to death and only a couple about SF (most by one man).

Last comment: the authors again ignored the contributions of the various subsets of GLBT culture. In particular the authors never mention the leather community nor the drag community except in passing and as kind of footnotes to what everyone else did. That's revisionist history and gives short shrift to some of the hardest-workers in the movement. Come on guys, a leatherman started the Advocate and the first GLBT community center, for example, yet neither is mentioned in those terms.

This is far from a dry, boring history. It is full of colorful stories that keep you reading through the night while informing you of the real struggle of real people. This book really helps you to know how far we've come and how much further we really have to go.... BRAVO on a very well written book!