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CHAPTER 3 And Now, Something Completely Different . . . I t was by now the middle of May 1967 in my fourth year in East Lansing; many of my contemporaries were getting ready to graduate, but I wasn’t, because I had thrown standard college stuff overboard in order to have this revolution. And now things were sort of settling down in a funny way, or it was time to move on, or it was time to really take a stand for social change, not just pretend, or . . . what was it time for, anyway? I certainly wasn’t sure, but something new was rumbling through my life, and I wasn’t feeling like carrying The Paper alone. I had a new girlfriend, Candy Schoenherr, who had joined our staff a few months earlier after being brought around by Eric Peterson, and she and I were spending time with a few new friends who, in turn, were looking at their sexual identities; together we were discovering bisexuality, and it was quite a rush for all of us. I remember going to Larry Tate, who had long since acknowledged his own homosexuality, one morning after a night of discovery and saying to him, “Me, too.” He responded with less than perfect enthusiasm, but I was thrilled. After so many years of mental and abstract principled activity, finally my body was beginning to speak, too. How would we incorporate this latest craze into our newspapering, and who would see that we met the deadlines? I tried bringing these disparate elements together by devoting space in The Paper to activities of the various people with whom I was exploring (they were, after all, active as writers, in student government, in the various protest activities), but this did not satisfy the conflicting urges I was feeling. Despite the naming of an “editorial board,” I was still feeling like the sole party responsible for meeting the deadlines, and sometimes it hurt too much. In a slightly later era, the answer to my dilemma would become obvious: explore the sexual conflicts and gender-role expectations explicitly in the newspaper. But at the time, such questions were still too new and too threatening to be examined clearly. One week late in May, when I was particularly depressed and when the help I needed from others wasn’t there, I simply didn’t put an issue together at all. Instead, I put out another two-page mimeographed flier made up to look like The Paper, as we had done more than a year earlier when political pressure gave us no other choice. This time I raised the question, “What if there were no issue of The Paper this week?” It was a desperate move; I needed to 28 | Chapter 3 know whether anyone cared. I found that they did. Andy Mollison of the State News paid me a visit to remind me of my responsibility to my readership. The next week, a sufficient number of staff people rallied around to put out the last issue for the school year: Issue 26, twenty pages. One of the most consistently enthusiastic staffers, Ron Diehl, wrote an article, “The Paper Is Dead, Long Live The Paper!” in which he reassured our readers that the experiment would carry on. On the subject of my mutiny the week before, he wrote, “At this point, Mike just wishes to swim back to shore and if the boat continues to float, well fine.” A fair enough assessment. Somehow, it seemed I had run out of things to say, or the confidence to say them. I was burned out, that’s for sure; my academic career was in ruins, and I urgently wanted the whole world to become a psychedelic wonderland so I could get some rest. But The Paper would continue. It was time to turn it over to a group of successors and take a break, maybe a permanent one. I went home to New York for a brief rest, to get ready for a summer of driving and camping around the country with Will Albert, one of my new gay friends, a would-be poet and adventurer who was just having his first coming-out experiences, and with whom I was hopelessly infatuated. While I was away, somehow, the county prosecutor decided the time had finally come to bust The Paper for drugs. His troops invaded my little house one night while my girlfriend Candy and nine others were partying there, and...

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