Left, Gay & Green: A Writer's Life

by Allen Young

Allen Young has held a number of interesting careers and roles. He has worked as a reporter for the Washington Post and Liberation News Service, protested the Vietnam War, edited several gay anthologies, joined the “no nukes” movement, and started a commune. Now, from his Octagon House in the North Quabbin region of Massachusetts, he provides insights into his most memorable moments. Young’s journey begins in a surprising place. He grew up on a poultry farm in New York’s Borscht Belt. His childhood gave him not only a lifelong love for the great outdoors but also his first political education. His Communist parents fostered in their son a passion for standing up to the bastions of power and fighting for the oppressed. After six years at Columbia and Stanford and a sojourn to South America, Young devoted himself wholeheartedly to a variety of causes. He gave up a reporter’s job at the Washington Post to join the New Left’s underground press, edited pioneering gay liberation anthologies, and put down new roots in one of the most rural parts of Massachusetts. Through it all, Young constantly explored what it meant to be “left, gay, and green.” His career, political pursuits, and relationships all took him in surprising new directions, but even as his identity was changing, Young never lost his true sense of self.

504 pages, Paperback

Published March 22, 2018

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Allen Young has written an absorbing and entertaining account of an astonishingly diverse life that tracks many of the most significant social and political currents of the 20th Century. This red diaper baby from a chicken farm in upstate New York became an internationally recognized journalist, left wing activist, gay liberationist, conservationist, and back-to-the-land homesteader. The heart of the book for me were the chapters depicting his shifting attitudes towards the New Left, and especially Cuba, as he reached for his own liberation as a gay man at the dawn of the gay liberation movement. It's no surprise, since my own story overlapped with Allen's, permitting a much valued long-distance friendship for some 40 years. Allen hides nothing in his story, sharing both the highs and lows of his life as an activist, followed by a quite dramatic shift to a totally different communal lifestyle in central Massachusetts. Along the way, he has continued his craft as a writer, editor, publisher, and cultural critic, with many earlier books to his credit. For those of us who lived through these revolutions, Allen Young reminds us why it mattered. And for younger folks or those whose have only heard second-hand about the struggles of the 60's and 70's, this is an excellent primer from a man whose life has mattered.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Left, Gay and Green is a beautifully written autobiography of Allen Young's life as an activist on multiple fronts during the turbulent and generation defining years of the sixties and forward. Beginning with his childhood as the son of two communist Jewish chicken farmers from the Catskills, Allen takes us on an amazing personal journey 0n the forefront of the anti-war movement, the new gay liberation movement and the struggles of creating and maintaining an intentional rural back to land community for gay men. It is an insiders personal view of a life intensely lived and examined and questioned while sweeping changes were redefining the country. To be fair, I must confess that I knew Allen in the 70's and 80's and we had a several mutual friends so the book is a step back to a part of my youth and fills in pieces of a story puzzle or perhaps a different perspective on on a slice of what I also lived. Nevertheless, if I had never heard of the author ,I think I still would have relished his story telling and I highly recommend it to the young and old as an important and insightful expose of an era.

[Linda Goldfarb · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want insight into the international world of Left politics in the 60', the rise of the Gay Rights movement and a return to the land, then Allen Young's book will give you all three!
A very honest autobiography that will teach you, delight you, and make you stop and think about the trajectory Allen took in his life. A long time well respected journalist, Allen makes the past come alive!