Books by Michael Rumaker

Fiction. THE BUTTERFLY first appeared in 1962 and drew on Rumaker's experiences as a patient in Rockland State Hospital and love affairs with Yoko Ono and Joyce Johnson. As Rumaker's protagonist puts it, "The real cure lay within himself, that the regenerative and restorative powers were within him the child of him which was yet to come into being " Jim's journey to sanity is still powerful and vivid today more than fifty years after it was originally published.

Fiction. New York Times: "111 Held in St. Patrick's AIDS Protest" -December 11, 1989 While some 4,500 people demonstrated outside St. Patrick's Cathedral yesterday, several dozen disrupted the Mass at 10:15 A.M. to protest John Cardinal O'Connor's recent statements on abortion, homosexuality and AIDS. Some of the protesters chained themselves to pews inside the cathedral, while others shouted or lay in aisles. The police said 111 people were arrested, including 43 inside the church. Many of the protesters were carried out on stretchers after refusing to stand up. Dozens of protesters blocked traffic on Fifth Avenue by lying in the street.

The dates are important to mention in order to put the open sensuality in the novel in perspective., that is, pre-AIDS, when male-male sexuality was being liberated from its centuries-long subterranean hiddenness into a visibility if only, in this instance, of the twilit and claustrophobic “freedom” of a bath house.     (M.R. from the intro)

A revealing portrait of a major poet of the SF Renaissance and a gripping account of late '50s gay life.