Flights of Angels

The Angels of Light were more than a seminal performance troupe in the 1970s; growing out of the equally legendary Cockettes in San Francisco (led by the charismatic Hibiscus, and subject of the award-winning documentary The Cockettes), the Angels were a way of life, putting on trashy, fantastical fairy tales come to life in a city and an era that was in the blissful throes of early gay liberation. Adrian Brooks was a member of the Angels; he was the author of many of their shows, and appeared in almost all of their productions during their heyday from late 1974 to 1980. In this vivid memoir, San Francisco in the 1970s comes to life as Brooks recounts the amazing stories of the Angels from behind closed doors, a book that is much about the politics of hippie experience in North America at the time. He also describes his early years as a Pennsylvania youth whose life is transformed by social and political activism: as a radical anti-war Quaker, as a volunteer for Martin Luther King, and later in New York's gallery scene, passing through Andy Warhol's circus before heading west, where the Angels made perfect, beautiful sense of the world. Featuring more than 50 full-colour photographs by Daniel Nicoletta, a freelance photographer who worked in Harvey Milk's camera store in San Francisco in the 1970s, Flights of Angels is a remarkable, elegiac ode to the ecstasy and defiance of queer life and culture before the AIDS crisis.