Woodstock
It was a long weekend. We piled into the remtal car, and drove north out of Manhattan.
But not to go to Woodstock. Already we knew that was going to be mass confusion (by the time we were on the road, it was already impossible to get to the site). No, we six young gay men were going to Vermont. East Burke, specifically.
So we had our own Woodstock, right there in East Burke. We thought about going to Woodstock, NY; but it seemed to us to be so totally, well, straight.
August 1969–this was just after the Stonewall riots. Nothing loomed larger in importance, that gay lib; which is what we talked about, what we did, in Vermont, and could not have done in Woodstock. It was simply so important to establish our identity as gay men, we were in the vanguard of that movement, and identifying with the great mass of young people, who were still floundering around, establishing their own identity–no, ours was a different cohort.
A year later, we were at the front of the first Gay Pride Day parade.