Lavender-Tinted Glasses: A Groovy Gay Look at the Summer of Love

Curated by community-based historian Joey Cain, the exhibition highlights the roles of four queers in San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love: poet Allen Ginsberg, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, philosopher Gavin Arthur and singer Janis Joplin.

All of them brought their perspectives as artists, visionaries and sexual outsiders to the uprising; all made a lasting impact on American culture. In addition, the exhibition documents how the city’s homophile community responded to the Summer of Love. The show will include historic photographs, ephemera and artifacts from The GLBT Historical Society and private collections.

“In San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district, young people were seeking a way out of what they saw as the soul-destroying alienation of materialism,” curator Joey Cain says. “They created new art, philosophies, politics, forms of self-expansion, music and relationships. The city already had a dynamic LGBTQ community, and many members saw the developments of the Summer of Love as opening the way to greater liberation.”

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Joey Cain is a San Francisco-based community activist, researcher and historian specializing in the history of gay and queer men. He has curated numerous exhibitions for the San Francisco Public Library including “My Days and Dreams: The Worlds of Edward Carpenter, Gay Freedom Pioneer,” “In Paths Untrodden: Walt Whitman and the Radical Faeries”, “Hymns to Hermes: The Poetics of James Broughton” and “Radically Gay: The Life of Harry Hay.”

Cain served for eight years on the board of directors of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade and Celebration Committee, including four years as president. He cochaired the community committee responsible for commissioning a bronze bust of Harvey Milk for San Francisco City Hall. His writing has appeared in RFD Magazine, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and most recently in the collection The Fire In Moonlight: Stories From the Radical Faeries (White Crane Books, 2011).