I was 16 years old. My friend Nara, named for the city in Japan by her dad who was stationed there after the war and loved the name, was living with the Motherfuckers commune in the East Village after running away from home. She was also working at the Fillmore East. She was going to Woodstock, and said I should come along. Me, I was just a nerdy lower middle class kid from Canarsie, and her life seemed gloriously decadent. Very Sally Bowles. Except that I hadn't read Berlin Stories yet, so what did I know? I knew I wanted to see Janis Joplin, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Sly Stone, and the very very cute Arlo Guthrie.
Tickets were $18, and that was a lot of money, but I had been working part time at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park as an usher (my guidance counselor helped me get a job there — she said: "You're too young to go to gay bars, but you can probably meet some other good young gay guys working there!" Yes, Mrs. Glaser was an angel) so I could afford to buy a ticket.
I didn't have a tent, so I borrowed one from a couple I knew who lived on Staten Island. Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband at the time, Walter Breen. Yes, the Marion Zimmer Bradley of Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series. Walter, I learned a couple of years later, after I came out, that he had written the book "Greek Love" under the pseudonym J.Z. Eglinton. For some blessed reason I was unaware at the time of his less scrupulous activities and his attentions never came my way. Marion and Walter were founders and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism in NY, and I had met up with the SCA at the World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland the previous year. This was before I was a Buddhist and living in the present! No, at that time, it was the future or the past, but definitely not the present.
Their tent was used at tournaments, bedecked with heraldic pennants. Nara was also a member, though I had met her originally at a meeting of Vulcanian Enterprises, the first Star Trek fan club in NY. Didn't I tell you I was a nerdy teen?
I met Nara on the corner of Houston and Mercer on the morning of Thursday, August 14th. The bus was supposed to be there at 10am. Waiting there with me was my friend Henry, and several people who worked with me at the Delacorte — Jim, Kevin, Jed and his girlfriend Rachel. I didn't tell my father I was going or ask for permission. My parents were separated at the time, he was living elsewhere, and I just told her I was going up that morning.
We waited for the bus for several hours. There were lots of people from the Motherfuckers commune there, since it was their bus — they had rented it from who know where. After about 4 hours in the sun on the street, Nara said she was going to the commune to see if anyone there knew what was going on. We waited another 4 hours. Nara didn't return, but in the early evening a bus drove up, and already feeling rather bedraggled, we got on.
I ended up sitting next to a hot young Yippie. A follower of Abbie Hoffman. I didn't realize the connection of the Motherfuckers and the Yippes. This sexy guy did not seem to realize Hoffman was Jewish, since he
was a rabid anti-semite, angrily ignorant and extraordinarily paranoid, spewing hate all the way up the highway. This did not feel like I was headed up for 3 days of peace and music. I tried to disengage from any conversation with him.
It is said that it was the Motherfuckers who cut the wire fences to make the festival free. All I know is it was so chaotic when we arrived there would have been no way to take tickets or charge people, since there was no real entrance. Which is why I still have my ticket!
The traffic was terrible. No, traffic suggests movement. At a certain point movement stopped. It was a
crawl. We would look out the window, and in the glare of the headlights (because at this point it was 2 in the morning) we saw people walking along the side of the road and passing the bus. And then of course, about ten miles back from the camp site, the bus broke down. There was a light rain.
We all got out of the bus and my friend Henry along with the Delacorte crew trudged for miles until we reached the edge of the campgrounds around 5am. I was not a happy camper.
We pitched the tent in the slowly lightening dark, and I immediately fell asleep inside. Cold. Hungry. Tired. Achey. Wet. The concert hadn't even started yet.
I was woken up by the tent falling in on me. Seems Jed and Kevin went deeper into the campground and decided we were too far back, and they wanted to pitch the tent closer to the action. I was, to put it mildly, pissed. Cranky. I was also outvoted even though I'd brought the tent.
We plunked ourselves down in an area of the campground known as Movement City. It was where all the political groups had tents. Anti-war groups. The Young Lords and the Black Panthers. There was also a banner for a group called The Gay Liberation Front. It was only six weeks after the Stonewall uprising, which I didn't really fully understand at the time. I didn't see the GLF tent. And believe me I looked even though I was barely out. Henry knew. He was an old friend. But none of the other guys from the Delacorte knew. Mrs. Glaser was right, there were gay guys working there, but I was too scared to come out to them. Though several years later, when I was in college with Jed, he came out to me. Ahhh, opportunities missed.
So there in the middle of Movement City, not far from our tent, another commune called the Hog Farm had set up a big improvised kitchen. They were serving a hot breakfast to everyone, and I was sooooo 
happy. Not only because it had been hours since I had eaten, but after we had unpacked all our backpacks in the tent, we realized that the only food we had was canned, and the can opener had been in Nara's backpack. She had never returned and we figured we'd never see her again that weekend.
Once I'd eaten and gotten some more rest I went exploring. There was another tent in Movement City that was a festival tent. Inside there were stacks of programs for the festival. I took three. I don't believe they were ever given out, though I have seen copies for sale on eBay on occasion. Wandering around I was surrounded by a miracle of youthful enthusiasm and creativity. Cars that had been painted psychedlic colors parked next to improvised Hogan-like structures. Tree houses filled with young men in gloriously long hair. Girls who went topless with barely a care and hardly a stare anywhere. Except for Henry who was in shock. And probably lots of others who just didn't want to seem uncool so they tried not to oogle.
And then the music started. What can I say that hasn't been written about this amazing line-up. Okay, here's my experience. The first day I fell asleep during the Incredible String
Band set — I thought they were incredibly dull. Took me two more years before I came to appreciate their subtlety and beauty. The first day was really a folk day, and while I had a crush on cute Arlo Guthrie, at the time folk was not my thing. I have since come around.
You've read about the rain. Maybe seen the movie. What doesn't come across is that we were in a field in the middle of a thunderstorm. It could be scary. And lets be clear what kind of field it was. It was a pasture. You know, where cows are set free to roam and eat grass. To be clearer about it, there was a smell to the earth and mud that had a distinctly barnyard aroma.
I hadn't packed for cold upstate mornings. Or rain. That said, I still have a pair of pants I wore to the festival. I've scanned in the pattern of this souvenir clothing from another era — as you can see below, it kind of looks like a Persian carpet on acid. The waist is size 26. I was also a skinny kid.
(Very "Sticky Fingers" eh?)
Late into the first night, I don't remember who was playing at the time, Nara walked up and sat down next to us. Just like she'd only been away a minute or two. Don't remember her story of what happened. All I know is she moved into the tent, and her can opener was very welcome. None of the other guys could figure out why we weren't sleeping together. She was extremely beautiful. And she was after me — hell, very soon after we'd met she announced that we were going to be married, and when I said no, she locked me in a closet until I promised to marry her. Talk about symbolism.
Sly. Janis. Santana (with his sexy drummer Mike Shrieve). The Who (whose Pete Townshed talked about his gay experiences years later). The Airplane. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That was some night. Sublime. The music was so incredible, and the energy of the crowd was so good that after a while the cold, the smelly mud, the rain, it all dissolved. There was just the music. The half a million bodies dancing under the stars.
Not to say there weren't other little issues. Overflowing port-a-potties with no toilet paper and no washing facilities. There was the day Kevin decided we needed more air in the tent so he cut a small window into it. Or the morning he made coffee for us all by straining hot water through coffee he'd put in his sock. I can still see Kevin, despite the fact that I didn't speak another word to him after we returned.
Jed and Rachel left early. While it was a very peaceful three days unlike what happened with the Stones at Altamount, there were some unfortunate events, including a couple of deaths. One was an accident where a tractor went over a man in a sleeping bag. Jed and Rachel saw it. And they just couldn't stay at that point.
Meanwhile, back in NYC, my dad heard from my mother that I'd gone to Woodstock since it was all over the newspapers. He was angry and decided he was going to come and get me and take me home. So he threw my 11 year old brother in the back of the car and they drove north.
They actually got to the road at the top of the field and could see down to the stage area. My brother remembers hearing the announcements that the blue acid was bad and that people shouldn't take it. You can only imagine how angry this made my father. Unlike Nara however, he didn't find me. After several hours he turned around, taking my wide-eyed kid brother back to Canarsie.
Two days later it was over. As Jimi Hendrix played, the field was already half empty as people had
started to leave and garbage was strewn everywhere in the mud. The environmental movement was still a few years away. We took down the tent and hitched our way into Monticello, riding on the hoods and trunks of the extremely slow moving cars since the Motherfucker bus was a useless hunk of yellow metal.
When we got into town, I found a pay phone and called home to see if my uncle, who I knew was staying somewhere nearby, could pick us up. Instead, my father decided to drive back up all over again (it was unbeknownst to me at the time that he'd already been up there) to pick us all up.
He was angry. But at that point Woodstock had been in the news for 4 days solid. It was a major event, and as pissed off as he was, he also got that something special had happened and we had been part of it. He dropped Jim and Kevin off in the Bronx. Nara at her mom's house in Brooklyn even though she'd run away and wasn't living there (now that was a scene) and then took Henry and me back to Canarsie.
The backpack and tent had to be left in the yard. It so reeked of manure that we hosed it off several times over the next few days. We hadn't seen the newspapers or heard the TV and radio reports so we had no idea how big a media event this had become.
In the neighborhood and in school I went from nerdy kid to cool celebrity kid overnight. I was still nerdy though — just a few weeks before, on July 21st, the day of the moon landing, I was at a party with the Vulcanian Enterprises crew celebrating by eating green cheese.
A little more than a year later I was in college. The day Jimi Hendrix died I was at an anti war demo and met Mark Segal of Gay Youth and the closet door was open all the way. My sexuality, no longer sublimated into science fiction conventions and medieval tournaments, fueled a new political awareness and activism.
Woodstock remains a touch point in my life. It is part of our cultural mythology of that era. As much as I love the Joni Mitchell song, it is mythology. But I will always be grateful to Nara for saying, "want to come along?" Regardless of how cranky I was at the time!
Woodstock, by Joni Mitchell:
I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock n roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I''m going to try an get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I don't know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
who
was doing research and trying to find a gay poet/performer online came across an earlier entry here on Gay Youth New York in the 70s. He just happened to be completing a book on Gay youth movements in the 70s, had interviewed some folks I know, and had a photo of GYNY at a pride parade in June 1970. These other folks had identified me as one of the people in the photo, except I didn't come to the group until September of 1970. So as the reggae/hip-hop artist so eloquently put it: It wasn't me. 
