{"value"=>"<p>This series contains seventy-eight notebooks and diaries, including forty-three spiral bound pocket memo books, one typescript covering the 1960s to 1986, and thirty-five day planner diaries covering 1971 to 2005.</p> <p>The notebooks, found in boxes 9 and 10, contain a wide variety of material including lists, addresses and phone numbers, poetry, notes for essays and novels, random reflections on life, teaching, the passing scene, notes from a Gay Male S/M Activists meeting, descriptions of a mescaline trip, and a night at the Continental Baths. The content varies from book to book, from single lines to extended essays. Of particular note are three lengthy travel journals written in 1972 when Kantrowitz traveled to Europe and across the United States.</p> <p>Kantrowitz also kept extremely consistent daily dairies, briefly noting at least a few words for nearly every day of his life from 1971 until 2005. These day planner diaries, which are found in boxes 42 through 44, record aspects of the author’s activist, professional and social activities. Details include protest events, short notes for his classes, travel plans and notes, who he voted for on election days, which films he was seeing, who he was dating, and friends he was having dinner with or caring for during the AIDS crisis. These day planners may have been helpful to the author in reconstructing specific events for <span class=\"title\">Under the Rainbow</span> and other autobiographical writings.</p> <p>The European journals (2 vols.) contain his impressions as a tourist in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Italy, and Greece as well as remarks on the gay bars and night life, and comparison of social attitudes with those prevalent in the United States. There are also meditations on his feelings of loneliness and varying degrees of self-consciousness as an American, a tourist, a gay man, and a Jew.</p> <p>The journal documenting his transcontinental trip with his close friend and former GAA president Jim Owles describes visits to Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, Billings, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver. Kantrowitz met with members of other gay organizations in nearly all of those cities and set down his reflections on the prevailing state of gay liberation and activism or social repression in those locales. He also describes the bar scene, gay and/or \"hip\" nightlife and his own sexual activities. The journal contains his thoughts on GAA and its failings, the Metropolitan Community Church, political action and the counter-culture, natural food, and varying modes of dress and personal expression. Much of the journal is devoted to discussion of his spiritual journey to discover an ideal life and love through which he could express his true identity, and ends with his ultimate disillusion and return to New York City.</p>"}