San Francisco - Alison Bing [14]
Ginsberg’s generation of ‘angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection’ experimented freely with art, radical politics, marijuana and one another, flouting 1950s social-climbing conventions and blatantly defying Senator Joe McCarthy’s alarmist call to weed out ‘communists in our midst.’ When McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) convened for the fourth time in San Francisco in 1960 to expose alleged communists, UC Berkeley students organized a disruptive, sing-along sit-in at City Hall. After police turned fire hoses on the protesters, thousands of San Franciscans rallied, and HUAC split town, never to return. It was official: the sixties had begun.
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FLOWER POWER
San Francisco would continue to be a testing ground for freedom of expression in the years to come, as comedian Lenny Bruce uttered the F-word on stage and burlesque dancer Carol Doda bared it all for titillated audiences in North Beach clubs. But neither jokes nor striptease would pop the last button of conventional morality in San Francisco – that was a job for the CIA. In a pronounced lapse in screening judgment, the CIA hired a writer named Ken Kesey to test psychoactive drugs intended to create the ultimate soldier. Instead, they had unwittingly inspired Kesey to write the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, drive psychedelic busloads of Merry Pranksters across country, and introduce the city to LSD and the Grateful Dead at the legendary Acid Tests.
After the Civil Rights movement anything seemed possible, and for a while it seemed that the freaky force of free thinking would stop the unpopular Vietnam War. At the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, trip master Timothy Leary urged a crowd of 20,000 to dream a new American dream and ‘turn on, tune in, drop out.’ Free music rang out in the streets, free food was provided by the Diggers and LSD by Owsley Stanley, free crash pads were found all over the Haight, and free love transpired on some very dubious free mattresses. For the duration of the Summer of Love – weeks, months, even a year, depending who you talk to and how stoned they were at the time – it seemed possible to make love, not war.
But a chill soon settled over San Francisco, and for once it wasn’t the afternoon fog. Civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on April 8, 1968, followed by the fatal shooting of Robert Kennedy on June 5, right after he’d won California’s presidential primary. Radicals worldwide called for revolution, and separatist groups like Oakland’s own Black Panther Party for Self-Defense took up arms. Meanwhile, recreational drug-taking was turning into a thankless career for many, a distinct itch in the nether regions was making the rounds, and still more busloads of teenage runaways were arriving in the ill-equipped, wigged-out Haight. The Haight Ashbury Free Clinic helped with the rehabbing and the itching, but the disillusionment seemed incurable when Hell’s Angels turned on the crowd at a free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, and beat protestors in Berkeley.
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CIAO, BELLA
Between the 1906 fire and 1914 Red Light Abatement Act, the curtains closed on many of the Barbary Coast’s boldest, bawdiest revues – including the celebrated Bella Union. The theater managed to reincarnate itself several times between 1849 and the 1906 fire, with the help of sensational advertising: ‘As Sweet and Charming Creatures As Ever Escaped a Female Seminary. Lovely Tresses! Lovely Lips! Buxom Forms! at the BELLA UNION. And Such Fun! If You Don’t Want to Risk