But there are also rewards. Here's an account of a group of people tending to a gay man who was evidently beaten by the police after a raid on a gay club called the Casbah. In this instance, author Lawrence Lipton's "I Am a Tape Recorder" approach brings us into this tiny converted garage in Venice where several people are nursing Ron Daley. 

Page 120-123, "Holy Barbarians"

(Scene: Ron Daley's pad. A made-over garage. Ronny has fitted it out
with redwood panel walls and laid straw mats over the cement floor wall
to wall. Two mattresses on the floor are covered with Japanese fabrics
and strewn with cylindrical and three-cornered cushions of pastel
colors. The bookcases are boards and glass bricks. Two lamps hang from
the ceiling, parchment lantern shades of modern design derived from the
Japanese. The components of the hi-fi are unenclosed. In one corner, a
triangular private shrine holding a single rosebud in an Oriental vase,
over it a rice paper print of the Buddha in contemplation, a Buddha of
Zen simplicity. Partitioned off with bamboo and rice paper screens is a
tiny kitchenette, all the utensils neatly hung on the wall, copperware,
shiny bright, and the dishes set up on the shelves, a spartan kitchen,
clean, monastically clean).

Ronny is lying on the bed,
swathed in bandages. He was brutally beaten up by vice squad officers
during questioning at the police station after a raid on the Casbah, a
gathering place for homosexuals, and is out on bail. Gilda Lewis has moved in to do nursing
duty. She is busy in the kitchen making some broth for Ronny. He is
telling me about the incident. His voice, always low and modulated, is almost a whisper.)

RON: It wasn't like anything I had ever experienced
before, Larry. His eyes were hazel, with little golden flecks in them.
I must have been pretty high at the time and I guess he was, too. But
it wasn't the pot altogether, I'm sure of that. It wasn't physical so
much as it was spiritual, something inside us or outside, out there,
who knows what it is, really? drawing us together. And he was talking.
Art. Music. Philosophy. Poetry. I can't recall what he said, exactly.
It wasn't what he was saying. It was a kind of spiritual presence. I
felt as if I had finally found someone who was like that other dark
side of me, myself, and I was looking at myself as in a mirror. And
discovering myself in ways I had never known before. I'm sure it isn't
a unique experience. Others must have known it — I remember vaguely having read about such a meeting once in was it Shelley? Or something in Gide?

(Gilda comes in with a cup of broth. I help to prop him while she
spoon-feeds him, slowly and very gently. His face is badly cut up under
the bandages. The doctor told me as he was leaving that he might be
badly disfigured for life. After the broth he continues with his story.
So far he has said nothing about the police beating, only about the
young man he met at the Casbah that night and what happened before the
raid.)

RON: There was something in his voice that I
remember. It seemed to be coming from somewhere far out. And I was
enveloped in it, like a palpable thing. Like he was an extension of
myself …  the mystical being … the Other … Narcissus' reflection
in the pool come to life and assuming an existence of its own. And
yet separate and different in some wonderful, mystical way … 
Something I had always dreamed might happen to me….

(He
goes on like this for some time, his voice trails off into silence. He
may be asleep. About the police beating nothing now or at any time
since then, to me or anyone that I know of. Angel Dan Davies is at the
door with Dave Gelden and Rhonda Tower, the chick Angel has been making
it with lately. They take off their sandals and leave them at the door
before entering, as Ron always does. Rhonda has bad news. The prominent
lawyer she knows has refused to take Ron's case.)

RHONDA: You could have knocked
me over with a feather. Like I was sure he'd take the case. He's taken
other cases where there wasn't any money. Liquor cases and labor cases,
things like that. But when I told him how the vice squad goons beat up
Ronny and the homosexual thing man, he just flipped. What kind of a friend was I, trying to drag him into a scene like this!

DAVE:
Like I told you, you were wasting your time going to a cat like that.
He's a square, man, and you don't catch a square sticking his neck out.

RHONDA (to me): Do you know any hip lawyers? (I shake my head and smile) See, you've got to go to a square in a case like this, whether you like it or not. They've got you over a barrel.

GILDA: Even the doctor was afraid to come when I told him what it was, and where it was.

ANGEL: It's
like money. Did you ever try sounding a square for money? He'll take
you to a fancy restaurant and spend ten bucks but you can't sound him
for money to buy food for your wife and kids. They'll buy you drinks in
a bar but sound them for a buck to buy groceries and they'll act like
they're embarrassed they'll hem and haw and Christ! — You'd think
you'd asked them to take their pants off in public or something.

DAVE: That's
what it is, man. Like they can't admit it, even to themselves, that
there's such a thing as real starvation in the world. Or like this
lawyer the cat can't face it, that a couple of cops will beat up on a
cat just because he's a homosexual. They've got to prove it to
themselves and to each other that they're real he-men.

RHONDA: Do you suppose the Civil Liberties Union lawyers might do something?

ANGEL: The
Liberals? The political cats? They're the biggest squares of all when
it comes to sex. Homosexuals yet — wow! We got to find a lawyer who
isn't prominent, or political or social. Some shyster who's mixed up in
the rackets, maybe. He's the only kind that'll have the guts to
mix it up with the cops in a police-beating case. He's beat, in a way,
so he doesn't have to worry what the country club boys or the PTA is
going to say about him. He doesn't have any illusions about justice or
civil rights or the Constitution.

RHONDA: I know a prostitute that works up on the Strip —
 
DAVE: Now you're talkin, Get ahold of this chick and she'll know what to do, who to go to.

ANGEL: Like
when I was on the road and I landed in a town broke, I learned one
thing: never go to the local minister or the rabbi or the social
agencies. All they'll want to know is who you've got back home that
they can ship you back to if somebody back home is willing to wire
them the money. Go to the first whorehouse you can find and talk to the
madam, or to some saloonkeeper in the slum part of town, I remember a
whore in Terre Haute once–

DAVE: They're the original
hipsters the outlaws, the outcasts. The square, like he's got all these
official lies he's got to believe, the schoolbook story and the church
story and all that shit – 

(Ronny stirs a little. Angel
lights a stick of tea and holds it to Ronny's lips to take a drag on.
Ronny smiles and tries to nod his thanks. It hurts.)

DAVE: (looks over at me and shakes his head):
Like I told you, Larry. The squares talk about their religion, their
laws, their justice, their charity, but sooner or later it always turns
out to be the man with a gun on his hip.

The text of the entire book is here in plain text and in pdf format.