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Farm Videos: Solar Panels, Earth Shelter, Permaculture Garden, Stephen & Ina May Gaskin, Third Planet Report, Radical Civics, ...more |
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Braves, White Knights, and Outlaws at the Human Be In >>
Tim Hodgdon | 11/1/2008 |
Early one warm Saturday morning in January 1967, people strolling near the polo field in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park might have been roused from their reverie by the sight of two shaggy, bearded men in white clothing walking slowly in a clockwise direction around the field. Or perhaps not. After all, the Haight-Ashbury district lay just beyond the park's eastern boundaries, and, with all the strange goings-on in that part of town over the past eighteen months, perhaps the sight of unkempt men chanting in strange languages and occasionally sounding cymbals and bells was no longer arresting. If passers-by paid little notice that morning, stories in the next day's newspapers would have informed them that a Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In had taken place the previous afternoon, with thousands of hippies in attendance. Earlier that morning, the perambulating, chanting pair, Beat poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, had performed pradakshina, a Hindu ritual of purification, in preparation for the event.1
2thumbMany of the "tribes" who gathered at the Be-In that day were much younger than Ginsberg, Snyder, and other Beat luminaries who occupied a small stage at the center of the field. The Be-In had been organized by Allen Cohen, publisher of the psychedelic San Francisco Oracle; his close associate and self-styled "Psychedelic Ranger," Michael Bowen; and Richard Alpert, colleague of Harvard-researcher-turned-LSD-guru Timothy Leary. They hoped that the gathering would reduce mistrust between two populations who frequently disagreed on the proper means and ends to social change. In order that the politicos of Berkeley might mingle with the hippies of the Haight-Ashbury, they scheduled a speech by Jerry Rubin, as well as appearances by Leary and a number of acid-rock bands.2
3It seems, in hindsight, that the Be-In did little to bridge the gulf between hippies and Berkeley radicals. But it is certain that many thousands more attended the event than the organizers had anticipated. The balky and underpowered public-address system proved entirely inadequate to make the luminaries' speeches a consistent focus of the gathering. Instead, the hip residents of "Psychedelphia" (or the Hashbury, or the New Community, as some called the burgeoning hippie enclave in the Haight-Ashbury district) reveled in their own numbers, basked in the unseasonably warm sun, and struck up conversations with psychedelically attired fellow "freaks." Some declared their bohemian affiliation through bright costuming and the carrying of eye-catching objects. They dotted the crowd with colorful cloaks, flags, capes, embroidery, and feathers, and perfumed the air with incense—and, of course, with the "sacred herb." The legendary Augustus Owsley Stanley had produced a particularly potent batch of LSD in anticipation of the occasion, and samples made their way through the crowd.3
4Steve Levine's account of the event for the Oracle offers us a glimpse of gender distinctions among the hippie pilgrims. He recorded the presence of "bare foot girls in priest's cloaks, madras saris, and corduroy," whose ethereal femininity contrasted sharply with the dynamic, manly demeanor of the shirtless "braves" at their side. One of the latter neutralized the fulminations of a fundamentalist preacher by means of a "baptis[m] in bubbles"—a renunciation of forceful confrontation, consonant with what Levine held to be the most admirable characteristics of the Noble Savage who had once roamed freely on the North American continent. Levine declared that the Be-In's spirit of transcendent love and harmony promised national redemption, as the great-grandsons of the white men who had slaughtered the buffalo of the Plains now seemed to be retracing their steps, this time admiring the Indian way of life rather than undermining it.4
5It is partly because of writing such as Levine's that we now tend to remember hippies as long-haired, flower-bedecked pacifists who sought spiritual ecstasy—or just plain fun—through drug experiences and the formation of communities in which human relationships mattered more than material possessions. Moreover, we may recall hippies as seekers of the forgotten knowledge of preindustrial peoples who had lived in harmony with Nature.5 In this perspective, hippies were—and, for many today, still are—the "gentle people with flowers in their hair" lauded in a song that became popular not long after the Be-In took place.6 Yet the stereotype of the Flower Child embodied only one dimension of the mass-mediated image of the hippie. Belief that the counterculture was populated by thousands of menacing drug fiends struck terror into the hearts of many parents as their children traversed the new hip bohemia. Less dramatically, the scruffy, hedonistic, and purportedly shiftless longhair also became a stock figure in American media, and still persists alongside the Flower Child and the Drug Fiend in American popular memory.
6I hope to problematize these popular images of the counterculture in order to tell a much more nuanced story about hippies, the 1960s, and American manhood in the late twentieth century. If, as Nancy Cott suggests, historians "influence the future by naming the past," then I hope that a more complex account will ground our choices about the American future in a critical awareness of the assumptions we make about the 1960s counterculture.7 A first step toward such an account is to examine, briefly, some of the ongoing conflicts among hip men present at the Be-In, which Levine either did not notice or chose to elide. This brief sketch will serve to frame the subject of this book's investigation.
7One of those who attended that day was Stephen Gaskin, who until shortly before had been an instructor at San Francisco State College. Years later, he recalled that day vividly, saying that as he approached the polo field the concentration of psychic energy there quite literally made his knees buckle; it took some time for him to steady himself and join the gathering.8 Gaskin had become deeply involved in the LSD subculture in 1965. "Acid," as it was commonly called, was a powerful, experimental drug; neither scientists nor the religious and civic authorities of the mid-twentieth century United States could have offered its youthful devotees much guidance on how to interpret the intense hallucinations it induced, even if they had wanted to. In any event, most "freaks" moved beyond scientific interpretations of the drug's effects to improvise their own ontologies, epistemologies, and phenomenologies of LSD.9 These proliferated on a new, Wild-West frontier of psychic experimentation.
8Gaskin, for his part, became convinced that this drug, and other hallucinogenics, gave users access to a metaphysical dimension of reality, the so-called astral plane. In this realm, "acid heads" gained direct experience of the Infinite that, heretofore, had been available only to those willing to travel the long, difficult path of the yogi or the Buddhist monk. On the astral plane, one could learn the true nature of a universe that operated on divine principles; in this realm of pure energy, one could perform feats that, from the limited perspective of the material plane, seemed magical. But Gaskin had also observed, during his time in the Haight, that the unscrupulous often abused this power and knowledge. Amid the crowd on the polo field that day, he encountered a young woman whose psyche lay wide open due to a heavy dose of LSD. Before her stood a man making hypnotic gestures with a stick of incense. To Gaskin, it seemed that the man was trying to rob the woman of her free will. He says that he stepped forward to offer assistance; she agreed to be rescued. In the coming years, Gaskin became an increasingly visible advocate of the ethical use of the power of the astral plane. He later told his followers, "I was minding my own business on Haight Street, quietly trying to blow my mind," but "superstitious and . . . destructive" tendencies there had made silence impossible. He became a self-described preacher of ethical spirituality, in opposition to those whom he called the "black magicians" of LSD.10
9In Gaskin's story, one psychedelic "brave" waved incense with sinister intent and the white knight, Gaskin, interceded, whereas Levine's bare-chested warrior might have seen fit simply to blow bubbles. By intervening, Gaskin rejected the presumption implicit in Levine's account, that the individual's public manifestation of faith in the ultimately benign character of the universe was sufficient, of itself, to bring about change in a violent, industrialized, and secular world. Instead, a deep conviction—that faith could only become manifest in good works—motivated his chivalrous rescue. As we will see in part 2 of this book, in an effort to return the human race to the path of spiritual evolution, Gaskin prescribed sweeping changes in men's character and behavior. The chivalrous, "tantric" manhood ideal that he and his followers developed—first in the Haight-Ashbury, and then at The Farm, a commune in Tennessee—was far too richly idiosyncratic to be fully encapsulated in the mass-mediated image of the Flower Child. But some of the features preserved in that image—the pacifistic renunciation of redemptive violence as a manly birthright, and the reverence for Nature as an abundant, fertile provider—characterized Gaskin and his followers far better than they did certain other hippies present at the Be-In.11
10"Flower power" did not even begin to capture the outlook of the group known as the Diggers, for example. They offered a highly principled resistance to what they regarded as the illegitimate authority of all hierarchical institutions grounded in the ownership of private property. Anarchists in all but name, they set up tables on the polo field to distribute thousands of sandwiches they had made from turkeys donated by the acid chemist, Owsley Stanley. The Diggers had seemingly burst upon the scene in the Haight-Ashbury the previous September, distributing provocative handbills, staging colorful street theater, and giving away food in Golden Gate Park in the afternoons. Their free food was not an act of charity to the destitute, but a declaration that, if private property cohered in the illegitimate hoarding of resources, then the food that they scrounged (and, sometimes, stole) already belonged to whomever would join them in partaking of it. "It's free," one of their handbills declared, "because it's yours."12
11Like many hippies in the Haight-Ashbury,13 the Diggers were artists: most of their number had left the San Francisco Mime Troupe after a dispute with its founder and director, R. G. Davis, over how best to transform theater into a vehicle for political subversion. The Diggers had coalesced, in part, around Mime Trouper Peter Berg's concept of the "life-actor": the revolutionary artist who rejected the stage as a venue for subversive artistry because it separated actor from audience. That separation, said Berg, rendered audiences passive, since as nonparticipants, they could compartmentalize even the most subversive theatrical message as merely a performance, requiring no action on their part beyond appreciation of the actors' talents. Furthermore, the stage encouraged actors' complicity in the notion that the bearers of high culture stood in superior relation to those who merely watched and applauded. The artist who wished to make revolution, Berg argued, should first engage in a self-imposed, systematic derepression by seeking out "hard kicks"—extreme experiences that would reveal the authentic self that lay buried beneath layers of deference to authority. Then, the life-actor should create from that authentic self a heroic persona and manifest it in guerrilla theater staged in everyday situations, drawing passers-by into a living, breathing alternative to "respectable" life choices. The Diggers took to the streets of the Haight-Ashbury with the faith that a revolutionary transformation of individual consciousness could undermine the illegitimate American society. When enough people chose freedom, the status quo would simply collapse for lack of support.14
12The Diggers were reluctant participants in the Be-In. The elevation of dignitaries on a stage clashed with their revolutionary praxis. Furthermore, as mordant critics of the New Left's efforts to lead the masses, they saw the invitation extended to Jerry Rubin as the aggrandizement of a flawed strategy. But perhaps most vexing for the Diggers was the legitimacy that the event conferred on its organizers. Cohen's psychedelic newspaper, the Oracle, was one constituent of the Haight Independent Proprietors (HIP), a group of merchants and artisans whose shops sold crafts, drug paraphernalia, books, posters, and recorded music to the New Community—and to anyone else who wished to buy. From the merchants' perspective, sale of these articles not only provided a livelihood, but also spread consciousness of a nonconfrontational "third way" toward human brotherhood, involving neither silent acquiescence to oppressive behavior, nor the use of force against it; hence their preference for blowing bubbles rather than active intervention. The Be-In served the same purpose: Cohen and his confreres believed that the more peaceful and nonthreatening such mass gatherings were, the more readily would Americans embrace the possibility of social change accomplished through love and transcendence. But for the Diggers, the merchants' sales of accoutrements represented nothing less than the commercialization and co-optation of the New Community.15
13The Diggers had done what they could to derail plans for the Be-In. They had met with Snyder and Ginsberg, hoping to convince them that augmenting the legitimacy of HIP would result in less social change, not more. Failing there, they decided that distributing food at such a well-attended function would serve their interests better than would a boycott. Yet they could not resist the urge to make a public statement of their opposition. In concert with some members of the Mime Troupe, the Diggers entered Golden Gate Park the night before the Be-In to assemble a "sculpture" consisting of chain-link fencing draped with animal entrails: a symbolic representation of the destructiveness of the then-raging Vietnam war. Unfortunately for the saboteurs, they chose the wrong site for their sculpture, erecting it on a nearby rugby pitch, not on the polo field. Still, the monument did cause a stir; the next day, rumors circulated in the Haight that Satanists had attempted to hex the gathering.16
14If Levine and his fellows admired the man who responded to provocation by placidly blowing soap bubbles, and if Gaskin modeled a pacifistic but chivalrous and proactive masculinity as the best way to make metaphysical faith manifest, the Diggers valorized the manliness of the principled outlaw, who, if circumstances required, would fight for his freedom and dignity. Months later, they circulated a handbill declaring that "an armed man is a free man." A year after the Be-In, they produced an icon of the masculine outlaw in a poster designed by Berg and graphic artist Mike McKibbon. Starting with a turn-of-the century photograph of two Chinese tong members lounging on a street corner, they rendered the dark-clad men's features, and the street corner they occupied, in minimal detail. Above the figures, they emblazoned Chinese ideographs for "revolution." At the bottom of the page, they inscribed the motto of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang: "1% Free." That same year, one of their number argued that "flower power smothers."17
15Our brief examination of events surrounding the Human Be-In locates some of the sharp conflicts that beset the San Francisco counterculture even as it gained national notoriety. Given those divisions, it is not surprising that there never existed a common male sex role—no generic "hippie manhood" to which all countercultural men subscribed. Instead, the various kinds of countercultural masculinity formed a continuum of perspectives and practices. All of the continuum's nodes deserve scholarly investigation. Here, I can hope to do justice to only two: in part 1, the "outlaw" masculinity of the Diggers, and in part 2, the "tantric," chivalrous, mystically inflected manhood ideal of Gaskin and his followers. I caution readers that the conclusions I reach in the following pages are merely a first word on hip masculinity, not the last, because these two forms fell at opposite extremes of the continuum. Thus, although my conclusions may help scholars tell the stories of other forms of hip masculinity, they do not necessarily apply beyond these two groups. Before we can make broader generalizations about countercultural manhood, much more research remains to be completed.
16Why study these particular groups, and not others? My choice was shaped in part by practical considerations. The Diggers, and the self-styled Farmies who eventually accompanied Gaskin to Tennessee, left more substantial bodies of documentary evidence than did most other hippies. That evidence includes not only hundreds of Digger handbills, but also more than a dozen published works: collective biographies, memoirs, handbooks on communal living, manuals on midwifery, and spiritual teachings. Furthermore, given the difficulty of demarcating the counterculture from the rest of American society, it seemed wise to begin the study of hip manhood with groups regarded by their peers as exemplars of commitment. The boldness of the Farmies and the Diggers (the latter renamed themselves the Free City Collective, then the Free Families) stirred controversy within the counterculture. At times, both became targets of heated criticism, and even denunciation, by other hippies. Nevertheless, their dedication and perseverance made it difficult for rivals to question their commitment, and this made them strong candidates for study, even as it also made them, in a sense, atypical among counterculturalists. This is not a study of the "typical" hippie man—if such a figure ever existed.
17The sharply, almost diametrically opposed approaches to manhood enacted by these exemplary groups prove relatively easy to describe, but explaining why and how they emerged requires a careful sifting of the evidence. In order to understand the counterculture's shaping of new forms of masculinity, we must recall the historical context within which hippies tried to create an alternative culture, beginning with a consideration of the mid-twentieth-century climate of opinion regarding social relations between the sexes. |
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