Flights of Angels: My Life with the Angels of Light

by Adrian Brooks, Dan Nicoletta (Photographs)

The Angels of Light were more than a queer performance troupe in the 1970s; growing out of the equally legendary Cockettes in San Francisco, the Angels were a way of life, putting on trashy, fantastical drag fairy tales in a city and an era that was in the blissful throes of early gay liberation. Adrian Brooks was a charter member of the Angels and the author of most of their shows. In this vivid memoir, San Francisco in the 1970s comes to life, as Brooks recounts amazing stories from behind closed doors. He also describes his early years as a Pennsylvania youth whose life is transformed working with Martin Luther King, then subsequently cavorting in Andy Warhol’s world in Manhattan, before heading west, where the Angels made perfect, beautiful sense of the world. Featuring more than seventy-five full-color photographs, Flight of Angels is a remarkable, elegiac ode to the ecstasy and defiance of queer life and culture before the AIDS crisis.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2007