Stonewall Park, named for the 1969 riots in New York, would be a literal gay village in the middle of the Nevada desert. The two men would found a community exclusively for LGBTQ people, where they could walk freely hand-in-hand down its streets.
Being gay was hard being black and gay, as Parkinson was, still harder.īut Schoonmaker had a solution as drastic as he felt the climate merited. Many believed gay men represented not just a risk of moral contagion, but literal infection: morticians regularly refused service to the grieving families of HIV-positive men. The two men lived in Nevada in the mid-1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when legally sanctioned homophobia (there was a federal, enforced law against sodomy) combined with HIV-inspired hysteria. Rob Schlegelįred Schoonmaker was the visionary Alfred Parkinson, whom he called his husband, his most devoted disciple. Alfred Parkinson and Fred Schoonmaker stand outside an old Union Pacific Railroad caboose, which they used temporarily using as their home (from the Bohemian Bugle, November 1986).
