Excerpts from my column in "Manifesto" (queer newspaper published monthly covering community life in Santa Cruz and Monterey), http://www.manifestonews.org/

Jack Nichols, the pioneering editor of "Gay", and current editor of GayToday on the web, calls this "a book of seminal biographies of leading lesbian and gay activists, those who dared to seize the moment during a particularly critical period of social change."

In summary: beg, borrow or steal a copy of this book, and read it, twice. This is living breathing history in it's most vivid and raw form - the biographical sketches in question were compiled from late 1971 to early 1972, and are a breathtaking and inspiring portrait of a newly emergent Queer America. This is exactly the type of material I hope to find when I pick an old paperback out of the library.

As I read down the list of people interviewed, not one of them was anyone I knew anything about... at best, I have a vague recognition of a name. And yet, these are people that queers my age (30) should know about. I felt like I was recovering my history by reading this book. After reading the first two interviews, I was so excited, I had to put the book down and run off the energy I'd built up.

What struck me, aside from how incredibly compelling each and every person's story was, is how fresh and relevant this book is: so many of the causes these pioneers fought for, are still at the top of our agenda; so many of the issues that the community had, internal to itself then, we still have; and how truly radical these pioneers were - no hesitation whatsoever about being gay or lesbian, out and proud and loud and mad as hell and doing something about it. Wow. Truly inspirational stuff.

The book does have a few weaknesses - most glaringly, it is almost entirely East Coast centric - Harry Hay isn't interviewed (among others you might logically think should have been included), and the gender balance is off (4 of 15 people profiled) although the selections in question give a good picture of the emerging divisions between gay men and lesbian women, especially the interview with Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin.

Nothing else I've read, other than "The Trouble with Harry Hay", provides such a vivid picture of the early days of the gay movement. If you care about our history, you've got to read this book.