Schoonmaker billed Stonewall Park as a resort community, a haven where gays could live and thrive away from AIDS-inspired and legally sanctioned homophobia. Schoonmaker, then 44, had faced homophobia long before moving to Nevada, which still had an anti-sodomy law, in the 1980s. Growing up in a small West Virginia mining town, he knew he was gay from age 9. In 1985, he tried to set up an earlier version of Stonewall Park in Silver Springs, Nev., only for the county planning commission to vote it down in 1986. In 1987, Schoonmaker tried one more time to create his gay utopia in an area near Nevada’s Thunder Mountain Park.

Source: Washington Post June 29, 2020 10:52 UTC