Village Voice reunion ...So Many Memories .. Don McNeill, Jill Johnson, Arthur Bell, Howard Smith, Voice Censorship demo

Nice to catch up with Lynn Holtz and she filled me in on why Karen Durban (Voice editor) was not there, I told her of recently having a face book conversation with John Wilcox who lives Ouija California. He was one of the founders of the Voice. Sorry I did not see Musto or Richard Goldstein or John Parles or Joe Levy or RJ Smith there ..were they present? I was telling John Leland about Don McNeill

who I think would have been the voice of his generation if he had not drowned on LSD while in a swimming hole upstate.Don was 22 and immersed himself in the late 60's world of hippies, Yippies, Be Ins, the Motherfuckers, draft card burnings and the Jade Companions and reported them vividly and accurately in the pages of the Voice.
I had a flashback to when Howard Smith called me and said "Jim, the Voice is throwing away its Gerstner printing press and if you want it I will tell you when it will be put on the Street," I answered "YES." Got a group of kids to wheel it over from the Voice's Christopher Street office to my loft at 26 Bond street. With it we printed the Communication Company /NYC' missives and distributed them freely locally. A combination of culture (first published Diane DePrima's extraordinary Revolutionary Letters and political stories about police harassment and news about the Vietnam war in an attempt to wake up the hippies who Tim Leary had convinced to drop out and get high. In the late 60's, pre cell phones and social media, it was Howard Smith writing in Scenes (then the most read regular feature in the Voice after Jules ' cartoons about my organizing projects like the Be In etc and Bob Fass on WBAI that were the key to the Communication Company's organizing success. It also was what got Abbie Hoffman to come knocking on my door. We woke up a lot of hippies, and they joined the Anti-War movement with flowers in their hair. All of these memories because fresh again in my mind being in the room with all of the people who made the Village Voice matter each week. From the editorial side to the production side to the sales and promotion side. I told Jeff Weinstein about how the first demonstration of the Gay Liberation Front right after it formed the 3rd night of the Stonewall Rebellion was out side the Voice offices on Christopher Street.

We had tried to place an ad for a dance we were organizing at Alternate U on 14th street for gay men and lesbians as an alternative to meeting in bars.


The woman head of advertising refused to take our ad because we used the word "gay" . Imagine!


And then trying to explain who Jill Johnson was to a younger person who had never heard of her or her writing ... Or knew that Arthur Bell, a Voice critic was a founding member of the Gay Activist Alliance








Here are Jill Johnson and Arthur Bell at the 1971 Gay Freedom March in NYC









Ah, the Voice Reunion was a night to remember!