It was through Bettina Aptheker, and the review I wrote of her recent book Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s, that I came into contact with Dale Mitchell. Both of us had mini-bios in her book as gay men who despite the party’s longtime intransigence on the LGBTQ issue, found ways of engaging with it. Dale had been involved with the Young Workers Liberation League and the Communist Party beginning in the early 1970s, with another phase in the party a decade later. So naturally, I assumed his autobiography, that he invited me to review, would cover these episodes of his life. I was mistaken. Mitchell has written a two-volume account of his life, and what I was looking forward to reviewing will all be in the second, forthcoming volume.
Still, having in my own youth dipped a toe into hippie freakdom, I committed to digging into Hippie Faggot Freak: The Making of a Gay Liberationist, his 484-page account of his growing-up years and at age 21 or so, discovering the truth at long last that gay is good. During those years, I had a strong aversion to sinking too deeply into the drug culture, both as a political decision and as a matter of personal self-preservation. I saw its effects on others around me and it freaked me out. So, I admit I have my judgments about the drug scene which figures so preeminently in this memoir.
Mitchell has a remarkable memory. It feels like he must have kept meticulous journals from which he drew. The pen portraits he paints of people, places and events are hyper-detailed and specific. Undoubtedly, he has made literature, with recollected dialogue, out of his experiences, often with Proustian recall of every acid trip, every shot of meth, crystal, speed, red pills and black pills and heaven knows what else. He often refers to his “trip book,” which suggests that he recorded his drugs, dosages, circumstances and reactions with meticulous faithfulness.
Reading author-editor Michael Denneny’s collection of writings recently, I was struck by his observation that gay men, especially those with HIV and AIDS who were not expecting to live much longer, were writing accounts of their lives as a last desperate attempt to be remembered in this world, and to render a truthful account of their foreshortened lives. Not all of them, he said, were publishable, but he wished there were some central repository where such writings could be gathered for future readers and social historians.
Dale Mitchell’s lengthy account of his first 21 years is intermittently rewarding, but it is a slog demanding much patience. Every act of bullying to which he’d been subjected as a kid, every painful conversation with his hopelessly conventional parents, every tentative move to establish a connection with other gay people in the various towns he or his family lived in, is recounted at tedious length that few readers, I suspect, will gladly tolerate. Once he moves to New York City, after a failed start at university, his life is consumed with drugs, highs, tobacco, sex, petty crime, and a long, self-denying stint as the complaisant young lover and “pin cushion” of George, a cruel, egotistical drug dealer and dispenser to whom, and to whose needle, he’s become degradedly addicted.
Well, it was the era of Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, and Dale found himself way over his depth in a raw, nihilistic culture that avoided commitment, attachment, involvement. It was only by happenstance that the weekend the Stonewall Rebellion broke out, Dale just chanced to be in the vicinity to witness it.
Where other historians of that period emphasize how the spark of that event immediately lit the imaginations of millions of gay people across the country and around the world, the illumination was dimmed, for Dale, by a thick, lingering haze of drugs. It would take another several months or a year, once he’d barely managed to escape with his life from such a sordid existence—“confusing degradation for love and decadence for rebellion”—before he truly understood the revolutionary implications of that uprising. There are whole chapters, 13-17, for example, that simply wallow in a kind of sexual and drug slavery on the rat-infested Lower East Side, that do little to advance the story, whatever sociological merit they may contain. New York’s counterculture movement, with uncensored glimpses here and there of Holly Woodlawn, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Joe D’Allesandro and a few other name players, never looked so pathetic and self-destructive.
As I read, I found myself thinking the book unspools as much like a novel as a memoir. I felt drawn more to the author’s powers of description than to the disciplined unfolding of a life. He’s especially good at tracing the nuanced inflections of such terms as “far out,” “fucked up” and “right on,” and clarifying fine distinctions between “dropouts,” “freaks” and “hippies.” Equally good is his recall of the specific books people read at the time and were influenced by. Perhaps his saving grace through it all was his thirst for literature, film and ideas.
If at any given point it seems Dale’s life was destined to be doomed to implosion, all the more remarkable that he, along with so many others, finally discovered what life as an out and proud, openly gay person could be. It’s important to acknowledge that virtually never in human history had such a phenomenon existed, so a record of that emerging consciousness, and an identifiable interest group in society, is itself worthy of being preserved, with all the mistakes, detours and dead ends along the way. There was light at the end of this particular tunnel.
As John, one of his friends at the time, posited, implanting a radical, though flawed image in Dale’s brain: “Just think what would happen if one day all the fags and dykes, hippies and freaks, spades and spicks, hustlers and drag queens—even those poor slobs, the ekers, struggling to make a go of it—all of us just stopped and said we’re not playing by the straight world’s rules anymore. We’re going to do what we think is right. My God, there’d be a fucking revolution!”
Where Mitchell’s book stops short of going is to speculate, even from within the available knowledge at the time, where all those drugs were coming from, at the height of the 1960s protest movements. How did they so emphatically take over and victimize so many communities—of youth, of people of color, of the poor? How they kept whole populations passive, and how the concomitant War on Drugs pushed so many into prison. No wonder that, contrary to the Weathermen, who had no working-class analysis whatsoever (except to entirely write off the unredeemable working class), but were entirely caught up in the false promise of youthful rebellion, other, more traditional political groups with stronger working-class ties looked pitifully upon people like Dale as having allowed forces perhaps beyond their personal control to destroy their lives and make them impotent.
Well, Dale did recover from his terrible youth, and became a dedicated people’s advocate in social welfare and human service. In recognition of his many accomplishments in the field of LGBT aging, of which he was a national leader, Mitchell was honored as Grand Marshal of Boston’s 2019 Pride.
I was not always enthralled by his brave first volume, but I anticipate that with his gay head on straight now, volume two, including his experience with the CPUSA and other groups, will be more refreshing, if still challenging in other ways.
Dale Mitchell
Hippie Faggot Freak: The Making of a Gay Liberationist
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2023
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-955826-49-5
484 pages, $28.95
ISBN 978-1-955826-50-1 (Kindle, EPUB), $9.99
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