Labor of Love (19 page)

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One of the most influential free lovers was Jefferson Poland (at various points in his career, he went by Jefferson Fuck and Jefferson Clitlick). Together with the gay activist Randy Wicker and the poet and musician Tuli Kupferberg, Poland founded the Sexual Freedom League in New York. Members met weekly to debate just how many sexual taboos one could violate. Gender roles, they unanimously agreed, should be abolished. Bisexuality and group sex were in. Monogamy was out. Bestiality, they decided, was okay as long as the animal did not resist.

The rallying cry of the Sexual Freedom League was “no rape, no regulation.” Consent, or the absence of it, was the only factor they believed ought to restrict anyone from engaging in any sex act he or she wanted. In 1965, Poland moved to San Francisco and founded a chapter of the Sexual Freedom League there. He held a highly publicized “nude wade-in” at a city beach and participated in the vibrant street culture of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

Student protests at Berkeley, which had paralyzed the campus during the previous school year, produced an environment receptive to these ideas.

The spiritualist Richard Thorne had been using the
Berkeley Barb
, an underground paper that started on campus, as a platform to argue that in the absence of monogamy, copulation was “holy.” “We must abstain from selfishness, jealousy, possessiveness,” he wrote, “but not copulation.”

At the beginning of 1967, thousands of young people flooded Golden Gate Park for the “Human Be-In,” a public festival presenting Beat poetry, radical leftist speeches, and performances by hippie bands. The audience openly took drugs and sunbathed nude as reporters and photographers gawked and snapped pictures. The psychologist–turned–LSD evangelist Timothy Leary called on them to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

It was the image of freedom, but some worried it wouldn't last. Standing onstage waiting to read his poetry, Allen Ginsberg turned to his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti and asked him a question below his breath: “What if we're wrong?”

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Images of the activities in San Francisco kept drawing more and more runaways and seekers. Many of them had no idea what they were looking for. They knew only what they were
not
looking for.

Julie Ann Schrader remembered seeing a series of photos of San Francisco in
Life
magazine when she was still a teenager living in suburban Wisconsin. They showed “a group of people wearing big smiles and little else at a love-in,” she reminisced to an interviewer in 2013. The moment she saw it, she said, she realized that she had to flee.

“If I remained in Wisconsin, I would marry my college sweetheart, teach Sunday school, have a family, and live the life my parents lived,” she wrote. “My future was locked in. The thought of it terrorized my spirit.” Schrader dropped out of school, ditched her middle-class life plan, and hitched a ride west. Many others did the same, eager to find love and romance outside the narrow possibilities that traditional marriage offered.

In San Francisco, couples dispensed with the formalities of dating. They met, mated, and drifted apart at incredible speeds. This is not to say that their relationships did not involve drama. Sex in San Francisco could mean many things. A one-night stand might lead to a spontaneous common-law marriage. A whirlwind romance might ensnare you in a life of hard drugs.

By the end of 1967, the Haight was flooded with runaways. The new world the hippies were trying to create was difficult to sustain. When they had repealed all the laws, they had not clearly established who would do the things that still needed to be done. In the absence of a plan, they often fell back onto highly stereotyped gender roles.

In her essay about the Summer of Love, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion described her encounter with “Max,” a young man who earnestly insists to her that it is possible to have loving relationships without any responsibilities or constraints.

“Max is telling me how he lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups. ‘I've had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner and I come in three days late and tell her I've been balling some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say ‘That's me, baby' and she laughs and says ‘That's you, Max.'”

“Max,” Didion concludes, “sees his life as a triumph over ‘don'ts.'”

Max may have rejected the repressive laws that had governed the lives of his parents. But what is striking about the relationship between Max and his “old lady” is how traditional it sounds. Max mentions his partner's cooking offhand; he takes it for granted that she should make him meals and love him unconditionally. After the destruction of the institutions of marriage and family, it was unclear how else things would ever run.

The Haight did have one rogue group of volunteers who attempted to respond to the mounting disorder that was taking over the streets: the Diggers. The core members of this semianonymous group of artists and radicals had met performing in the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Their guiding star was the concept of “free.”

With a doctor named David Smith, the group established the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which treated the rampant spread of venereal disease and drug-related illness. They founded a “free store,” full of donated goods that anyone was allowed to take. They staged several “eat-ins,” serving free meals to runaways and municipal employees. They supported free street concerts by Big Brother and the Grateful Dead. They protested every for-profit, commercialized music event.

“Suckers buy what lovers get for free,” their protest signs declared. “It's yours. You want to dance—dance in the street.”

The greatest ambition of the Diggers had been to teach by personal example.

The actor Peter Coyote, one of the founding members of the group, later explained their philosophy: “Our hope was that if we were skillful enough in creating concrete examples of existence as free people, the example would be infectious.”

Yet this process did not take place quite as spontaneously as they expected. Gathering clothes for the free store, cooking and distributing food—it all got to be a drag. And so, while the men planned spectacles to draw attention to the group, the women did the grunt work to keep things going.

They woke up at five in the morning, got the old truck running, stole or charmed meat and vegetables from grocers, cooked up hearty stews, lugged them, steaming, out to the Panhandle in massive steel milk containers, and ladled them out. Susan Keese, one of the female Diggers, later helped found the Black Bear commune north of San Francisco. She recalled what it took to keep the philosophy of “free” going.

“We would go collect free food from the San Francisco produce market a couple of days per week,” she told a reporter in 2007. “The guys at the market would give us food because of how we looked. We traded on that.” It turned out that free wasn't free. Like Charity Girls of the 1890s and 1900s, these activists had to flirt for food; once they had it, they handed it over to boyfriends and strangers. The ethos that the Diggers promoted depended on being able to take advantage of female work.

Even the most politically radical men often sought traditional romantic relationships. In her autobiography, the activist and scholar Angela Davis expressed frustration and exhaustion at the sexism that she encountered while organizing with the Black Panther Party. “I was criticized very heavily, especially by male members … for doing ‘a man's job.' Women should not play leadership roles, they said. A woman was supposed to ‘inspire' her man and educate his children.”

The activist and writer Toni Cade Bambara reported that the men she worked with in the Panthers justified their disregard for the concerns of female members by appealing to their shared ambitions to win racial justice. “Invariably I hear from some dude that Black women must be supportive and patient so that Black men can regain their manhood,” she recalled
.
“So the shit goes on.”

It made sense that many of the “dudes” Bambara worked with felt unmanned by the legacy of slavery. Systematic racism harshly punished black men for any show of sexuality and made it almost impossible for them to earn a living wage. Still, the fact was that the macho culture of the Black Panthers told its female members that they had to put their desires and aspirations second. Like the female Diggers, and like Max's “old lady,” they should work and wait.

The Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael famously dissed the sisters who were trying to assist his cause. In 1964, he heard about a position paper that female volunteers were circulating about the role of women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the civil rights organization he would later lead. “What is the position of women in SNCC?” Carmichael joked. “The position of women in SNCC is prone.”

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Many “hippie chicks” ended up paying for “free” with more than shopping and washing dishes. They endured a culture of rampant sexual violence—of rape or sex they forced themselves to endure. “If It's Their Thing,” the
Berkeley Barb
advised women in 1967, “Just Let 'em Leer.” Pity the women who did not feel so nonchalant.

In 1967, a member of the Diggers named Chester Anderson left the group in disgust and started publishing public communiqués on his mimeograph machine. Some of the bulletins that he posted around the Haight criticized the hypocrisy and racism of what he called “segregated bohemia.” Others criticized its misogyny. One announced that the streets had become dangerous for women.

“Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3000 mikes [micrograms of LSD, twelve times the standard dose] & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last. The politics & ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street.”

The policeman Colin Barker claimed in 1968 that rapes were so common in and around Golden Gate Park that they were “hardly ever reported.” The poet Ed Sanders described the neighborhood during those years as “a valley of thousands of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.”

Even when they were not drugged and “raffled off,” women in the counterculture often strained to live up to the ideal that they should always want sex. Susan Keese recalled her fears of seeming counter–sexual revolutionary. “There was this ethic that it was good for you to have as much sex as possible … and you were uptight and hung up if you did not. Some women seemed to be comfortable with that, but I was not.”

Within the counterculture, gameness for any sexual adventure was seen as proof of sophistication. Women felt enormous pressure to act on the principle of “free love,” even when their desires told them to act otherwise.

“It became the personal responsibility of women in the 1960s to work at removing their inhibitions,” the feminist Sheila Jeffreys recalled in her memoir
Anticlimax.
“To be accused by a man of having inhibitions was a serious matter, the implication being that the woman was old-fashioned, narrow-minded and somehow psychologically damaged.”

According to this logic, psychological health meant having to embrace a form of sexuality much like the one that
Playboy
purveyed. That is, sex understood strictly as (physical) “pleasure … without becoming emotionally involved.”

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The sexual revolution did encourage many women to do what they wanted, when they wanted, despite any cultural inhibitions they inherited. But when free lovers described the revolution as the freedom from
all
inhibition, they failed to acknowledge that individuals should also have the freedom to remain as inhibited as they like. Most of us feel inhibited when we feel unsafe. Many of us feel inhibited when we are with strangers. We may suddenly rediscover inhibitions and “hang-ups” after losing trust or interest in a partner.

Like Jeffreys, many women in the counterculture struggled to overcome creeping sensations of reluctance and fear. Often, they had good reasons to feel them. A woman was far more likely to experience sexual violence than her male counterpart. If a pregnancy or sexually transmitted infection resulted, she would almost always suffer worse consequences. The Summer of Love took place five years before she could legally seek an abortion.

Advocates of free love proposed to remove the obstacles that convention put in the way of the free exchange of affection. Yet in some cases, rather than liberating sex, sexual revolutionaries simply seemed to take it from people who were most vulnerable to being exploited.

Despite the great hopes that this era had placed on freedom, it could not bring the utopia that some had hoped for. In an unequal society, being freed from formal legal restrictions will not immediately make individuals equally free to pursue their ambitions. Freedom to start a business, for example, is not much use if you have no start-up capital. Freedom without food may mean only freedom to starve.

The free love that promised to liberate individuals from social conventions took a very particular model of male individuality for granted. It was based on a fantasy of manliness that media like
Playboy
sold. Freedom from having to feel certain ways about sex turned into an imperative not to feel anything about sex. This free love could start to look a lot like freedom from love.

Today, conservatives often say that the sexual revolution duped women into seizing freedoms they did not actually want. The opposite is true. The sexual revolution did not take things too far. It did not take things far enough. It did not change gender roles and romantic relationships as dramatically as they would need to be changed in order to make everyone as free as the idealists promised. It tore down walls, but it did not build a new world.