A Counterhistory of a Counterculture: Jim Downs' Stand By Me

Gay “Be-In,” Central Park, New York, June 28, 1970. (Photo: Diana Davies, New York Public Library)

Established in the Bay Area in 1970, Gay Sunshine, later Gay Sunshine Journal, was part of the flowering of post-Stonewall gay newspapers that also included Detroit’s Gay Liberator, Philadelphia’s Gay Alternative, Boston’s Fag Rag, and New York’s Come Out! The cover of the paper’s August ’71 issue, drawn in black ink by Bruce Reifel in the lineage of Aubrey Beardsley, depicts a naked man and woman running with raised fists and broken manacles in front of a five-pointed star that we can trust to be red in spirit. The man has a Clark Gable mustache; the woman the long, center-parted hair of Joan Baez or Shulamith Firestone. The caption, GAY BROTHERS & SISTERS UNITE! FREE OURSEVES · SMASH SEXISM, redoubles the Marxist heritage while urging on an already tenuous gay-and-lesbian alliance that in coming years would be further tested by divergent interests and male chauvinism. Although the cover typifies the countercultural naturalism that sought to separate nakedness from titillation, it’s also a reminder of how closely linked political and sexual freedom were in the early years of gay liberation.

Needless to say, the seventies, even before the powerful conservative revanchism that ignited in the decade’s later years, were not years of unchecked liberty for LGBT communities. Governmental repression, public bigotry, internalized oppression, and the constant threat of violence hardly vanished overnight – in many areas change was felt not at all. But in certain neighborhoods in some cities, there were, along with hopes for radical societal transformation, new opportunities for dramatically freer sexual expression. For some, sex itself was revolutionary, a source of unifying pleasure that could militate against shame and repression while challenging fundamental institutions and values: the family, the church, monogamy, patriarchy. It was often impossible to imagine political equality growing without the continued expansion of sexual freedom. “A humane socialism,” Charley Shively wrote in ’74, “must move beyond trade-union economism; it must lose its prudery, and find sexuality.” Or as Edmund White put it in his 2009 memoir, City Boy, “We thought that sexual freedom was the same thing as freedom. We were willing to contemplate the possibility of ‘gay politics’ or ‘gay culture,’ but only if we’d first secured total gay sexual liberty.”

Time's Marrow: Anthony Hamilton's What I'm Feelin'

Anthony Hamilton newest album is What I'm Feelin'. (Photo: LaVan Anderson)

We are pleased to welcome Dylan Hicks as a guest contributor to Critics at Large.

Late last year, R&B singer Anthony Hamilton enjoyed some internet attention for gospel, doo wop, and other old-school rejiggerings of Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” Silentó’s “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” and 2 Chainz’s “Watch Out.” The videos, showing Hamilton performing either with his road band or a cappella with his background singers, the HamilTones, were as much settings as covers, or at least the lyrics were often loosed altogether from their original musical contexts. Links were no doubt prodded in part by the comedy of anachronism, and as such the interpretations were related to novelty groups like Big Daddy, who in the eighties and nineties covered then-current hits in fifties styles. But Hamilton's spirit was of continuity rather than incongruity, with his message being that music, particularly in the hands of virtuoso vocalists, is endlessly malleable because – in some essential, time-blurring way – it’s all the same stuff. A similar spirit pervades Hamilton’s albums, including the just-released What I’m Feelin’ (RCA Records). His music is frequently referential but not retrogressive, steeped in the past but not wistful for it.