Lloyd R Free

Bittersweet Lloyd R Free

What was Beatnik San Francisco like in 1960? What if you were a Social Justice Warrior and the cops beat you to a pulp? Fight or flight?

BITTERSWEET captures the zeitgeist of 1960: America transitioning from the gray decade of Eisenhower and McCarthy to JFK and Camelot; The House on Un-American Activities Committee versus the flourishing Beatnik counterculture. Its two protagonists, Renny and Max, students at Berkeley, flirt with Beat poetry, Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth, Bebop, and student led civil rights demonstrations. They join the SLATE organized anti-HUAC demonstration turned riot at San Francisco City Hall. The police billy clubs change their lives forever. To escape a withering culture of night sticks, sexual repression and censorship, they sail to France, land of the Enlightenment and sexual liberation where they shed their adolescence and become young men. Join them on their epic, unforgettable journey into an incandescent world of vivid characters, romance, sex and love.