Frommer's San Francisco 2012 - Matthew Poole [15]
The 3-day Trips Festival’s “Acid Test Graduation” event at the Warehouse on Harriet Street in 1966.
The ’60s Haight scene was very different from the ’50s Beat scene. The hippies were much younger than the Beats had been, constituting the first youth movement to take over the nation. Ironically, they also became the first generation of young, independent, and moneyed consumers to be courted by corporations. Ultimately, the Haight and the hippie movement deteriorated from love and flowers into drugs and crime, drawing a fringe of crazies like Charles Manson and leaving only a legacy of sex, drugs, violence, and consumerism. As early as October 1967, the “Diggers,” who had opened a free shop and soup kitchen in the Haight, symbolically buried the dream in a clay casket in Buena Vista Park.
The end of the Vietnam War and the resignation of President Nixon took the edge off politics. The last fling of the mentality that had driven the 1960s occurred in 1974 when Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army and participated in their bank-robbing spree before surrendering in San Francisco in 1975.
THE 1970S: GAY RIGHTS The homosexual community in San Francisco was essentially founded at the end of World War II, when thousands of military personnel were discharged back to the United States via San Francisco. A substantial number of those men were homosexual and decided to stay on in San Francisco. A gay community grew up along Polk Street between Sutter and California streets. Later, the larger community moved into the Castro, where it remains today.
The modern-day gay political movement is usually traced to the 1969 Stonewall raid and riots in Greenwich Village. Although the political movement started in New York, California had already given birth to two major organizations for gay rights: the Mattachine Society, founded in 1951 by Henry Hay in Los Angeles, and the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization founded in 1955 in San Francisco.
Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, leads the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade on Market Street.
After Stonewall, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom was created in spring 1969 in San Francisco; a Gay Liberation Front chapter was organized at Berkeley. In fall 1969, Robert Patterson, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, referred to homosexuals as “semi males, drag darlings,” and “women who aren’t exactly women.” On October 31 at noon a group began a peaceful picket of the Examiner. Peace reigned until someone threw a bag of printer’s ink from an Examiner window. Someone wrote “Fuck the Examiner” on the wall, and the police moved in to clear the crowd, clubbing them as they went. The remaining pickets retreated to Glide Methodist Church and then marched on City Hall. Unfortunately, the mayor was away. Unable to air their grievances, they started a sit-in that lasted until 5pm, when they were ordered to leave. Most did, but three remained and were arrested.
Later that year, an anti-Thanksgiving rally was staged at which gays protested against several national and local businesses: Western and Delta airlines, the former for firing lesbian flight attendants, the latter for refusing to sell a ticket to a young man wearing a Gay Power button; KFOG, for its antihomosexual broadcasting; and also some local gay bars for exploitation. On May 14, 1970, a group of gay and women’s liberationists invaded the convention of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco to protest the reading of a paper on aversion therapy