Portrait of a performance artist as a young man
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Donald Currie brings the gay 60s to your car or living room
San Francisco-- Perhaps rebellious adolescents of the 2040s will look back nostalgically on turn-of-millennium youth-- before the mandatory
chip-implants, global DNA tracking, and pre-employment brainscanning-- as having enjoyed freedom's golden age. But for now, so far as Golden Eras for Coming of Age
are concerned, nothing holds a candle to the 1960s.
In his debut CD Sex and Mayhem 1-- and now continuing in the just-released sequel-- Donald Currie offers, via prose and sound-effects, a memoir of
growing up and coming out, grope-by-grope, in San Francisco of the 1950s and 60s. Currie's medium is a cross between post-mod performance art and 1930s
radio drama, and it works.
True, the story starts off mired in a swamp of cliché-- gawky sissy-boy discovers movies, lypsyncs in drag at the junior-high talent show-- all as prelude
to falling in love and eloping with the drama teacher. But Currie goes on with his tale, and his craft gets unstuck as his life flows into the gathering currents of
the 60s. Soon, there's drugs, experimental theater, communal living and fighting, and craziness apoppin'. In
Sex and Mayhem 2, Currie's story takes flight in the
winds of the ensuing Kultur storm and soars, an anthem for a generation. Or as he puts it,
Sex & Mayhem "is a racy resume of a randy kid... a rampageous verbal riot
of street level history careening and crashing through a half century of social change, self-discovery, and fashion blunders." Part 2 closes with an account of the
day that, for Currie, the 60s came abruptly-- like an acid trip switching-off or coitus hitting
interruptus-- to an end.
One hopes our raconteur is weaving a Sex and Mayhem
3 to bring us into the 70s, 80s, 90s, and noughts. Give him encouragement by browsing, credit
card in hand, to http://cdbaby.com/cd/donaldcurrie, or looking in your local gay bookstore. As it is, parts 1 and 2 are a perfect gift for a gay youngster who needs
a medicinal shot of homosexual history, but isn't likely to swallow without a sugary spoonful of witty storytelling.
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