Eric William Brown

Peace, Love, Incarceration Eric William Brown

I'd spread my wings and soared, found undreamed of freedom and acceptance, and then plummeted into the depths of my darkest nightmare.1967: my 17th year, my Summer of Love. From puberty to adolescence, my little-town classmates had bullied and beat me up for being odd. With the advent of the hippie movement, things changed: unconventionality was now in vogue. My three-week visit to San Francisco confirmed a great truth; a deviant need not be a persona non grata; being different also means being unique. It's all about finding the right market. Three weeks of love and peace, sex and drugs, sit-ins and be-ins: The City was my Xanadu, a place where I could be who and what I was without self-restraint or shame. My peculiarities became my major assets. Returning home with the certainty life offered more than taunts and ill-treatment, I inadvertently landed in the brutal confines of the Los Angeles juvenile detention center: a holding-place for teenage rapists, murderers, drug addicts, and runaways. An ordeal for someone of straight majority, a hellhole for a young queer. But the hope I'd gained in San Francisco continued to shine even in those dark hours and inspired me to make a decision that would change my life. Although Peace, Love, Incarceration is a memoir in genre, it is also a soul-searching narrative of my attempt to discover what makes a man a man, to find logic in man's inhumanity to his own kind in war and peace, and discovering a way of dealing with social constraints and mores of a macho oriented society in the America of the1950s and 1960s. Seen through the eyes of a gay man, the principles within the story are universal and apply to anyone who survived puberty.