Fred Schoonmaker was the visionary; Alfred Parkinson, whom he called his husband, his most devoted disciple. The two men lived in Nevada in the mid-1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when legally sanctioned homophobia (with a federal, enforced law against sodomy) combined with HIV-inspired hysteria.
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. Being gay was hard; being black and gay, as Parkinson was, still harder.
But Schoonmaker had a solution as drastic as he felt the climate merited. The two men would found a community exclusively for LGBTQ people, where they could walk freely hand-in-hand down its streets. Stonewall Park, named for the 1969 riots in New York, would be a literal gay village in the middle of the Nevada desert.
It was for them as a couple as much as it was for their community, he told friends, but it was also his legacy to the younger Parkinson, whom he expected to outlive him—a “safe and peaceful place” away from the hatred of the rest of the world.
Schoonmaker had grown up far from Nevada, in Wellsburg, West Virginia. It was a river town with a steel plant, and a diminishing population with historically high Ku Klux Klan membership. At five, Schoonmaker realized he was “definitely different;” by 14, he was scrabbling change together for a $1.25 60-mile bus trip to Pittsburgh, home of the nearest gay bar. Somebody there would always pay his way back, he told the Washington Post in 1986. “I don’t know where my parents thought I was going.”
Being a gay teenager in the shadows of the West Virginian hills could be brutal. Though Schoonmaker found refuge at the end of the bus route, two of his close friends were unable to accept being gay, and killed themselves at the age of 16.
These experiences, suggests historian Dennis McBride in his book Out of the Neon Closet: Queer Community in the Silver State, planted the seeds for Schoonmaker’s belief that gay people could only be happy in a segregated society, as did time in same-sex communal living situations in San Francisco in the 1960s. “You get tired of all the daily jokes, the humiliation. If you’re not gay or lesbian, there’s no way to put yourself in that position. I was never beat up or anything. But you don’t have to be the victim of a fag-bashing every six weeks,” he told the Post.