San Francisco in the 1960s — history remembers it, with an almost mythic reverence, as a sexual revolution, a bastion of mind-altering psychedelics, amidst a backdrop of radical music and art that would rock the very foundations of American culture.

But by whom, and for whom?

What’s often revered as an era during which long-haired, barefooted hippies who danced in the streets exploded the prudish sexual mores of the 1950s has, like most golden-tinged historical moments, a more nuanced reality.

San Francisco was not always a so-called “gay Mecca.” In the 1950s and 1960s, sexual indecency was strictly frowned upon, gay folks shunned from many groups and professions, and bars and restaurants where they would hang out or cruise one another were frequently raided by cops, the patrons routinely arrested, beaten, and/or forced to bribe police officers for their freedom. As a result, gay, queer, and trans people have always been deeply interwoven with the history of San Francisco’s counterculture communities.

The Beats did much to put San Francisco - and its sexually “deviant” inhabitants - on the map. Allen Ginsberg, of course, became iconic for his poem Howl, not only for the poem’s homoerotic power but also for the swift and dramatic backlash he faced for it. Ginsberg had been tried in court in the aftermath of McCarthy-era obscenity trials for his frank discussion of gay sexuality, although this did not stop him from serving as a key figure (an almost paternal one, for some) in the gay counterculture, as the Beat generation gave way to the children of the 1960s, whom they christened, “Hippies.”

Perhaps the largest, and certainly the most iconic, coming-together of these hippies occurred on January 14th, 1967, in the Polo Fields of Golden Gate Park, for a massive, flamboyant, acid-fueled “Human Be-In” — a play on words stemming from the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement and the love-ins of the anti-war movement. The date for this “Gathering of Tribes” had been chosen carefully, thanks to its astrological import, by Gavin Arthur. An astrologer, sexologist, and bisexual man — who according to legend had once bedded both Neal Cassady and Edward Carpenter — Arthur himself became a key proponent of free love and the gay liberation movement. As a writer, he penned The Circle of Sex, and he publicized the Be-In through articles in a short-lived hippie newspaper called the San Francisco Oracle.

Many if not most of the key figures who spoke to the crowd that day would today be considered somewhere along the queer spectrum. (Although, whether they would identify themselves that way is another question — many people we’ve interviewed for Out of Site: Haight-Ashbury decry the notion of identifying themselves at all, choosing instead to revel in the dissolving categories of free love and open sexuality. Regardless, many of these people had lovers who shared their gender identity). Ginsberg addressed the crowd, along with Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Jerry Rubin, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, comedian Dick Gregory, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. All the hip Bay Area bands played: Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin), Quicksilver Messenger Service, and, of course, the Grateful Dead — during whose set a skydiver landed amongst the crowd in the Polo Fields. Lenore Kandel also took the stage, a poet and author of the infamous Love Book, for which she, too, was tried in court for indecency, over the book’s overt portrayal of female eroticism and gratuitous use of the word fuck — which, coming from a woman author, was basically as big of an infraction.

While the 1960s are lionized as a period of sexual revolution, in no small part due to the advent of the birth control pill, this freedom was not granted to women writing “obscenely” about sex, and certainly not to gay people living and writing openly about their sex lives. At the time of the Be-In in 1967, it was still illegal to be gay, and homosexuality would not be removed as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 1973. Kandel, Ginsberg, and their contemporaries defied both tradition and the law to broadcast a sexual ideology that celebrated deviant sexualities which mainstream America still condemned as indecent, immoral, obscene, etc.

Mike Caffee, today a friend and collaborator of Eye Zen, attended the Be-In as a young man. He credits the Be-In as a crucial shift in self-perception for the attendant hippies. He says, “We were no longer the 'bad' people that our parents and culture had warned us about, but a loving and caring people, trying to overcome unjust cultural repression with passive non-violent self-expression and Love.”

Indeed, 20,000 individuals spanning every age and race poured into the park that day — met by only two lone policemen mounted on horseback, wholly powerless to stop the mass of humanity and their flagrant dismissal of public nudity and drug use laws. Mike continues,

“The sensation of liberation from drug prohibition and power over the police was exhilarating. We could smoke pot in front of the police and laugh in their faces. There was absolutely nothing they could do about it, but stand by in disbelief. Perhaps for the first time, the boomer generation realized that their power was in their number.”

It would be hard to overstate how important this moment was for members of the gay counterculture: suddenly, they were surrounded by throngs of people like them, reveling openly and in broad daylight, when up until this point, gay gatherings happened mostly in secretive, smaller groups, in a select few bars, clubs, cafes and businesses.

“Love is Happening,” read flyers promoting the Be-In, printed by Mike Caffee and his friend, artist/muralist and former ballet dancer Chuck Arnett. The promise of a drug-fueled, mind-opening celebration at which love was at the center marks a transition of sorts in the gay (male) culture of San Francisco: what had once been dominated by macho, motorcycle-riding leathermen began to shift and embrace more gender-fuckery and expansive, queer love, thanks in no small part to LSD. Chuck Arnett, most well-known for his mural depicting leathermen at the Tool Box, a 4th St. gay bar where he worked, later created another mural at the original Folsom St. Stud, showing a prototypical leatherman transforming via acid trip into a flamboyant and colorful drag queen. Leathermen and drag queens both symbolized this shift from a cultural expectation of conformity to radical and deeply personal self-actualization. The emphasis was no longer on fitting into a norm: there was no norm, just the individual.

*Image courtesy of Mike Caffee. Mural by Chuck Arnett*

The hippies were joined not only by their embrace of sexual openness and radical love in the face of the system, but by the belief in a “collective consciousness” that was both spiritual and political in nature. Timothy Leary’s now-iconic words, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” urged the gathered hippies (many mid-acid-trip) to embrace the type of group-oriented consciousness and collective spiritual freedom from conventional society that LSD promoted. By the time Leary spoke these words at the Be-In in 1967, he had already been pushed out of his academic career, along with his research partner Ram Dass, as a retaliation against their research into psilocybin and LSD. Leary and Ram Dass (the adopted hippie name of Richard Alpert, who himself was openly bisexual) are now known to history as early psychedelic activists, and supporters of the hippie movement for its integration of mind-altering drugs into their political and social lives.

Hippie spirituality, heavily influenced by psychedelics, also took inspiration from Buddhist practices. The Be-In, and the hippie movement more broadly, were largely responsible for bringing knowledge of Buddhism to the American public. And Buddhist ideology was front and center at the Be-In: Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and later San Francisco Zen Center, led the Be-In’s crowd in meditation. For some, the enlightenment provided by Buddhist teachings, and the enlightenment achieved through taking psychedelics, were interconnected. Both encouraged folks to “shift concentration from our usual reflections on the 'then and there' to direct perception of the 'here and now', or 'living in the present moment',” says Caffee.

The psychedelic, Buddhist-inflected hippie spirituality also inspired the free love, fluid sexual mores and revolution against prudishness that the hippies came to symbolize. Among Rev. Suzuki’s followers were a number of gay/queer folks who took personal inspiration from his teaching; both Issan Dorsey (a drag queen-turned-monk) and Phillip Wallen (a writer connected to the Beats, whose nebulous sexuality included romantic male domestic partners) would go on to become Abbots in the Zen centers of San Francisco. Mike Caffee, also a student of Suzuki Roshi’s, told us, “While Zen appealed to intellectuals, as a cure for intellectualism, [Allen] Ginsberg and [Lenore] Kandel came more from a tantric sexual space.” During Kandel’s Be-In address, she cried out to the crowd, “The Buddha will reach us all through Love. Not through doctrine, not through teachings, but through Love!”

And this is where we’ll start, with our deep dive into forgotten queer histories of the hippie Haight. Somewhat counterintuitively, the Be-In was considered by some hippies as the “last public acid trip,” bemoaning the fact that media’s dramatic response to the hippies had both exploded their community’s notoriety and opened it to “clones” who dug the hippie vibe but were perhaps less committed to its ideological roots. Indeed, in October of that year, after the explosion of the 1967 Summer of Love, the Diggers commune would parade down Haight St in a funeral procession. “Here lies the Hippie, son of mass media,” their signs read, mourning the loss of the “real” hippie to the stereotyping of the hysterical, overblown media coverage. But this was just the beginning of the radical queer counterculture in which gay people began to live out loud in an embodied synthesis of their aesthetic, spiritual, and political goals.

Author-Jax Blaska: I’m a San Francisco-bred, East Coast-baked theatremaker and teacher now based in Oakland, and I’m the research & production assistant on Out of Site: Haight-Ashbury. These posts, we hope, will serve as companion pieces to our show as well as rooting our work in its rich historical context. I hope you enjoy. Yours in creative solidarity and ongoing queer liberation, Jax.

DEEP DIVE is a series of blog posts, dialogues, wonderings, and archival research into the history & culture of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, and the queer & counterculture communities that flourished there. This series is the product of nearly 6 months of research and conversations, including oral history interviews & correspondences with Joey Cain, Michael Sumner, David Weissman, Jim Siegel, Fayette Hauser, Peggy Casserta, and Mike Caffee; books such as Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation (Tommi Avicolli Mecca); Flower Power Man (Mary Lou Harris, Jayne Anne Harris, Eloise Harris); I Ran Into Some Trouble (Peggy Casserta); films such as The Cockettes (David Weissman, 2002) and Pickup’s Tricks (Gregory Pickup, 1973); and many more organizations, friends, and resources too numerous to name.

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1967: Human Be-In