‘Banned from Califonia’ Explores Denver’s Early LGBTQ History

Banned from California is a special treat for LGBTQ readers in Denver and Colorado. The last two-thirds of the book takes place mostly in Denver during the early years of Colorado’s LGBTQ civil rights movement, offering a historical look at some of Colorado and Denver’s own, queer history from years past.

This moving biography is about Jim Foshee who was an activist in Colorado’s early gay liberation movement. It crackles with details of the late-1950s Denver Area Council Mattachine Society; the little remembered but revolutionary 1971-72 Denver Gay Liberation Front; the groundbreaking and influential Gay Coalition of Denver; the beginnings of The Center (initially called the Gay Community Center of Colorado); the 1970s dawning of Denver’s new LGBTQ press; Denver’s 1977 LGBTQ weekly radio show Colorado Gaybreak; the 1976 fight with the city of Denver for the LGBTQ community’s right to hold Denver’s first pride parade; and so much more.

But first, the book details Jim Foshee’s early life. Born in 1939, he was institutionalized first in an orphanage, later in a reform school, and eventually spent his teenage years committed to a mental hospital for the diagnosed mental illness “sexual deviation and sociopathic personality.”

Knowing all about his institutionalizations, it is no surprise for readers to learn that he eventually ended up in a 1960s Texas prison, where he was forced to toil on a chain gang under an oppressive, hot summer sun.

Finally, he moved to Denver, where he found love and happiness. Working in the nascent LGBTQ movement, he found a cause worth living for and effectively put his destiny in his own hands.

Publishers Weekly claimed, “The book is alive with personal and local stories. It captures an extraordinary life amid a century of change.”

For more information, visit the book’s website here.

Banned from California, (Hardcover ISBN# 978-1734010817 & Paperback ISBN# 978-1734010800 & also available on Kindle e-book), Wentworth-Schwartz Publishing Company, 378 pages

Photo courtesy of Robert C. Steele