Items

• My first satyrnalia
  One of two Michael Rumaker (1932-2019) books seized, this novel follows a narrator through a night in New York, on the streets, in the bookshops and in “make-out booths”. The narrator’s ultimate destination is an apartment where a Fairy (Faerie) Circle is gathering for the Saturnalia of the book’s title, an “orgiastic celebration” of the Winter Solstice. The Fairy Circle refers to a meeting of the Radical Faeries, a countercultural movement founded in 1979. The novel is scattered with references to non-fictional locations, books and music, including the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Christopher Street, Donna Summer and Arthur Evans’s book ‘Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture’ (also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). The novel, therefore, provides a sense of gay culture in Greenwich Village as it was forty years ago.
• Street theater : the twenty-seventh of June, 1969, in two acts
  Part of the ‘JH Press Gay Play Script’ series, the play is set on Christopher Street on the eve of the police raids on the Stonewall Inn bar which led to the Stonewall Uprising, in which Doric Wilson (1939-2011) was a participant. The “street theater” of the title is created by the characters including a “flower child”, “street queens”, a “vice cop”, a “student radical” and a “politically incorrect lesbian”. First performed in 1982 in San Francisco, the play later moved to New York. Wilson also worked as a barman, the tips from which helped support his theatrical endeavours, including TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence) an Off Off-Broadway theatre space.