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Flights of Angels: My Life with the Angels of Light | 
| Author: Adrian Brooks
Creator: Dan Nicoletta
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy Used: $12.99
You Save: $14.96 (54%)
Rating:  11 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1551522314
Dewey Decimal Number: 791.092
EAN: 9781551522319
ASIN: 1551522314
Publication Date: January 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Hardcover with dust jacket. Text clean and binding tight. DJ creased and torn. Slight bow to book.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
Incongruities September 1, 2008
Prudence Brown (New York, NY United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This memoir comes unvarnished, a raw but beautifully written account of life in an era characterized by inspired and truly inventive energy alongside desperation and despair. I was in awe of the artistic risks taken by members of the Angels of Light and loved reading about the unfolding dramas involved in creating each production. This was a group that knew how to push every limit, producing moments of brilliance and courage and genuine fun. Adrian Brooks captures the intensity of these moments and portrays the stunning assortment of those involved in vivid detail. The Angels clearly had a hell of a good time.
But in the end I came away feeling saddened by the fact that this group that had such creative energy was ultimately unable to get it together to protect its members--even its children--from danger. Angels watched each other abuse themselves and abuse others, but few seemed to step up to demonstrate responsibility or even much kindness.
Brooks portrays these incongruities in all their inspiring and troubling detail. He writes with psychological insight so that the characters ring true, but he refrains from wholesale judgments. As part of the action, he does not shy away from giving us a clear picture of his own struggles as well as triumphs. I came away appreciating the complexity of the intersection of time, place and characters that stayed with me long after I had finished reading the book--a reflection, to me, of its quality and value.
A Wonderful Flight Indeed August 23, 2008
Nicole N. Lastreto (Mendocino County)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Flights of Angels held me from the start, and that includes the gorgeous cover art too. It is truly a wonderful memoir of an era that impressed so many of us and Adrian Brooks has portrayed it perfectly. What Adrian has captured here is more than a memory though, it is also the feeling, the very heart of the times, and he carries us through it with grace. Thank you Adrian Brooks!
Nikki Lastreto
An Angel's view: August 11, 2008
P. Jacobson (U.S.A.)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was an 'Angel of Light' from 1973 and I love this book. It is beautiful. It is honest. And it is real. It also expresses
the group's belief in peace and art and the spirit of free theater.
Adrian praises geniuses and the Light but shows the ugly Dark side too. He had to. If not, this would be a coverup
but he is fair about a scene that only a few people ever saw from the inside. I was one. And he was too. After 1974,
he was one of the big stars and a tremendous positive offstage influence offstage.
San Francisco was the world capital of Gay Revolution in the 1970s and the 'Angels' were shamans. As a performer
and scriptwriter, Adrian helped the group out of anarchy and helped channel our greatest triumphs that were political,
gutsy, funny, transforming and beautiful. All done in a spirit of love and celebration.
The era comes alive as Adrian also shares his poems for the first time since the Seventies. They are as wonderful
as his other writing. If anyone wants to know the inside story about the art vanguard in San Francisco before AIDS
they should read this book. I salute it. And I'm as proud to be in it as I was to be an Angel of Light.
Tony Angel
San Francisco
Angels We Have Heard on High July 31, 2008
Robert I. Philips (Guerneville, CA, USA)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Let me be as candid as author Adrian Brooks is in this amazingly layered snapshot of San Francisco during some of its most culture-creating years (1973-1981), and admit that I was strongly biased to pick up this book and love it. And I did both.
My bias: I have co-published one of Adrian's novels, Roulette, and I'm giddy to publish another, Black and White (and red all over), in the fall of 2008.
But why I loved Flights of Angels was not simply a knee-jerk "I love anything Adrian Brooks" writes response.
Yes, Adrian is an author who knows how to create an authorial voice--all the while juggling those of many characters--and work it. In other words, he can tell one hell of a story. And yes, there are parallels between the wild bunches of misfits making incredible communities in both Roulette and Black and White (and red all over) and what the Angels of Light were trying to create on- and off-stage in San Francisco. And yes, there are over-the-top antics in all three books--though fact is way wilder than fiction. But what really makes this memoir so much more than just a tell-all of a zany troupe of artists and activists and now and then a lot of drag queens or even of San Francisco itself, is the relentless and often ruthless scrutiny with which Adrian Brooks looks at himself and from there, the events and the times around him.
In fact, when I finished Flights of Angels, this memoir was no longer a memoir to me. It was a piercing first-person look at San Francisco during a time where much of the good, the bad, and the ugly there was a refraction of what was going on and what was to come on the larger national and world stages. And San Francisco from the mid 1960s on was not for the faint of heart, or art. It was more like a social and cultural particle accelerator--where tiny specs of energy smashed together on the stage, on the streets, and in the sheets to make incredible explosions of light and energy-- surrounded all around by shadows and the dark. And all of that is here in this book. And perhaps all this messy complexity is best wrapped up in the tragic story of the little boy Sham, the group's living mascot and totem, whose beauty and pain comes to embody the best to the worst of both the Angels' and the greater seventies peace, love, and happiness visions and their crashing failures.
But as ponderous as I'm making the book sound, it's incredibly readable and enjoyable because we come to it through Adrian's wild ride from scion of a Mainline Philadelphia family to bohemian black sheep to a world-traveled artist with a ramrod-straight spiritual spine who looks back unflinchingly at the times he and his fellow angels looked the other way so they and their bedazzled audiences could only see beauty--fleeting but transformative--onstage.
And I have to add that nothing enhances that very real beauty like the photos of Dan Nicoletta. His collaboration with Adrian makes this book an amazing time capsule for those of who could not be there (I was a tween in Tulsa, Oklahoma myself).
Finally, as a writer, I really appreciated how Adrian Brooks contextualizes the creation of each poem in the post-epilogue section of the book. It was a fascinating way to add yet another layer to this study of San Francisco's art--from its more measured fits and starts in the poetry scene to its most brazen soaring and crashing with the Angels.
From one survivor to another...JOB WELL DONE!!! July 9, 2008
Muchas Plumas (Palm Desert, California USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
As a fellow "survivor" of the Drugs, Rock 'n Roll, and the San Francisco free-spirited Gay Sexual Revolution of the 70's....I feel we are very fortunate that Adrian Brooks has the insight, awareness, and writing talents to document the Beauty, Madness and Theatrics of the phenomenon called "The Angels of Light"! Not only was Adrian a keen-sighted observer...he was also an integral participant who had the first-hand opportunity to enter and exit the very vortex of this creative cyclone.
His book ""Flights of Angels" is a tell-all...good-bad...beautiful-horrific...that is a "must read" for any one truly interested in this "once-in-a-lifetime" exotic living theater troupe. Adrian's unflinching portrayal of those involved(including himself)shows his brutally honest approach to this entertaining and mystifying cast of characters. If he stepped on some HIGH-heeled toes...or ruffled some of the gaudy plumage..SO BE IT! His end result in this Book is both very entertaining and A JOB WELL DONE!!!
ps For some good laughs...read his book "Roulette". And...for an erotic book...read one of his earliest works "The Glass Arcade" (an intriguing creation of book that is highly erotic...yet devoid of blatant sex scenes).
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