My Odyssey Through the Underground Press

Foreword

Foreword TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA M ichael “Mica” Kindman and I shared something very special: a love of the underground press. He started an underground newspaper at Michigan State University in 1965 that became one of the first five members of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS). I started the first underground newspaper at my high school in 1969. It never made it to the UPS. I don’t even remember what my friends and I called it. We distributed the three or four stapled, 11 × 17 sheets with the unsigned articles among our fellow students at Bishop (now St. John) Neumann High School in working-class South Philadelphia. It wasn’t very popular. Few students questioned the war in Vietnam or supported the counterculture. We were the “hippie” outsiders. In fact, several classmates wished me “luck in the SDS” in my student yearbook. The underground paper was started in response to my being fired from The Rocket, the official school publication. I was told by the priest in charge that my services “would no longer be needed,” after I submitted two articles that were rejected without explanation. One was against the war in Vietnam, the other, the school’s ridiculous hair-length rule (it couldn’t touch the back of your shirt collar or Father Cox would pull you into his office and give you a haircut you didn’t want). The administration never discovered who was behind the underground paper. They would’ve been surprised to learn that a clean-cut boy on the Student Council printed it for us on the school’s Gestetner when no one was around. We only published two or three issues that semester, as it was the end of our senior year. Three years later, I was writing for underground newspapers, both gay and straight. I cofounded Radicalqueen, a ’zine that explored transgender issues from a radical feminist perspective. Our small but very vocal collective believed that everyone had the right to define themselves as whatever gender they chose, even if it meant inventing new ones. It’s something Mica might have appreciated had he ever come across our publication. But our circulation was small and mostly confined to Philadelphia. I also wrote for the Distant Drummer, Philadelphia’s leading underground publication, and eventually got a full-time gig at the Philadelphia Gay News. xiv | Foreword Beyond our love for the alternative press, Mica and I had something else in common: we were both queer. While I immersed myself in the Gay Liberation Front at Temple University, where I went to school to avoid the draft, Mica got himself a permanent deferment and ended up living with a Boston-based cult headed by a charismatic musician, Mel Lyman, who had stepped on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to play “Rock of Ages” on his harmonica and calm the crowds who were pissed off at Bob Dylan for playing an electric set. Mica’s love/hate relationship with the communal group would continue throughout his life. As much as he tried to free himself of it, he never succeeded in rejecting the ideals that it espoused, or the people he met there. In the end, he had to confess that it gave him something he needed—a sense of belonging. “Much of what I was hoping to find and attach myself to in the Community—purpose, eternal purpose, I mean, and a place in the evolution of mankind, family, security and the productivity and creativity which they can inspire—” Mica writes, “somehow never came to me while I was there, even though I did and do believe they were there.” While Lyman’s group wasn’t the right fit, Mica eventually found his inner peace and purpose in life with the Radical Faeries in San Francisco in the late ’80s, a few years before he died of AIDS. It’s important to look beyond the hard, cold facts of the history and development of the underground press to the lives of those who founded the newspapers and magazines, wrote for them, and helped them grow and prosper. The ’60s and ’70s were not just about political movements and institutions; they were also about how the people who “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out” lived their daily lives. Mica’s recapitulation, as he calls it, is a record of an era long past—a time when idealism wasn’t a bad word, and questioning was a rite of passage...