Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Journal of Civil and Human Rights
Mark Abraham
This article examines the ideologies, practices, and aesthetics of the West
Hollywood freaks, the Haight-Ashbury Diggers, and the Lower East Side
Yippies between 1965 and 1969. These countercultural radicals conceptualized
pleasure as a revolutionary heuristic: sex was central to critiques of middle-class
culture and to effective strategies of resistance against the imperatives of the
dominant order. The articulation of pleasure, performance, and protest by
countercultural radicals has been unfairly obscured in the prevailing treatment
of the counterculture by historians of mainstream liberalism, civil rights activism,
and the New Left. Freak, Digger, and Yippie activists emphasized culture
as the primary target of radical dissent and believed that robust, effective
protest required the expression and experience of pleasure in public. To
explore the ideologies, practices, and aesthetics of these activists, I look at
the music, dance, fashion, and art they created by examining newspapers,
magazines, albums, liner notes, broadsides, documentaries, and photographs,
as well as later memoirs and interviews. While countercultural radicals were
geographically fragmented and ideologically diverse, they collectively forged
an effective, durable fusion of pleasure, performance, and protest between
1965 and 1969.
Journal of Civil and Human Rights Fall/Winter 2018, Vol. 4, No. 2 pp. 6–30
©2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
painted half black and half white, tiaras of feathers, jewels shimmering in the
dim light, sequined faces, leather, foil, paper, leaves, and thousands of beautiful
and bizarre substances.
Expressive dancing, freak activist Pamela Des Barres later reminisced, was a
“lurking lunacy” that was “fun”: “We all tried to outdo each other.” In 1966,
Franzoni characterized freak bodies as an invitation “to stand up together
with a clear mind” and reform “this screwed up world.” Freak activist Gail
Zappa later noted that people “came to see the freaks dance.” Some joined in.2
Freak-outs critiqued middle-class culture. Through movement and
style, grotesque freak bodies rejected the premises and promises of hard
work, corporate capitalism, and nuclear families for the post–World War
Two middle class: that productive bodies were fulfilled bodies because they
manufactured, consumed, and procreated. Cold War nationalists saw the
expansion of the white middle class at the center of U.S. political, social,
and cultural life as proof of this pudding. To freak activists, the productive
body that “most people of today” valued was a sham; in 1965, Zappa asserted
that it had “no soul.” Zappa’s songs brand the “plastic people” who affirmed
these hoax imperatives “chrome,” “vegetables,” and “toys”—pejoratives that
suggested U.S. bodies were interchangeable with the products they consumed.
President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was a tautology, visualized on an
illustrated foldout map of West Hollywood that was included with Freak
Out! as a “cultural desert” where identical factories manufactured identical
goods to sell to identical families. Plastic was not progress; it infected the
body with anhedonia—what freak activist Christine Frka’s liner notes to
Permanent Damage call a “dreaded lingering disease.” Middle-class culture,
celebrated by many U.S. Americans as something real and pleasurable, was a
self-articulated Potemkin village: a ubiquitous set of vaunted imperatives that
chastened and reconstituted pleasure and power in ways that freak activists
found abhorrent.3
Freak bodies were central to extraordinary and everyday revolt against
these imperatives. In 1969, Frka claimed that middle-class bodies were
“too plain, too simple.” Zappa’s liner notes to Freak Out! challenged freak
bodies to chafe against “outmoded and restricting standards of thinking,
dress, and social etiquette” and subvert “the social structure as a whole.”
The flesh of freak bodies was ecstatic and autoerotic; the desires of freak
bodies were authentic, in stark contrast to the curated aspirations of middle-
class “national social slavery”; and the ability of freak bodies to express and
experience pleasure was a powerful kind of praxis. Franzoni’s recollection of
first participating in a freak-out is illustrative: “I started dancing in there; I
just let it go.” Pleasure and movement mollified Franzoni’s middle-class ennui;
the burned-out salesman let go of the expectation that a man should find
fulfillment as “a straight businessman.” In Teen’s freak exposé, Zappa explains
that embodied pleasure allowed activists to “unravel their hang-ups” and
“enter into a state of complete self-expression.” Freak activists believed that
flush, vibrant, creative bodies could dance their way to liberation. Pleasure,
performance, and protest were all essential, and all essentially the same thing.4
Freaks were not the only activists to embrace pleasure and performance as
key components of the radical toolkit between 1965 and 1969. In September
1966, Emmett Grogan and Billy Murcott of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury
Diggers issued an anonymous broadside prescribing “a medley of incoher-
ent shouts” against a “surface reality” that exalted middle-class imperatives.
In November, an anonymous Digger article in the Berkeley Barb declared
that people should “refuse to consume”: “When love does its thing it does
it for love.” The same fall, Digger activist Peter Berg wrote “Trip without a
Ticket,” encouraging activists to use “guerilla theater” to create “a cast of freed
beings.” In 1968’s Revolution for the Hell of It, Abbie Hoffman of New York’s
Lower East Side Yippies asserts that “work is postponement of pleasure.”
In 1970’s Do It! Yippie activist Jerry Rubin argues that being an “actor” was
“revolutionary in a society of passive consumers.” In a 1967 Whicker’s World
interview, freak activist Szou Paulekas explains why: “The minute they look
at me, I convince them that I’m for real and I’m happy and they would love
to be this way.” These activists insisted that their grotesque expressions and
beautiful experiences—what Digger activist Lenore Kandel later character-
ized as “an incredible variety of unbelievable actions”—were “for real.” For
these activists, the personal was political and the political was personal.5
This article examines the ideologies, practices, and aesthetics of the
radical counterculture between 1965 and 1969. Countercultural radicals
conceptualized pleasure as a revolutionary heuristic: sex was central to
critiques of middle-class culture and to effective strategies of dissent. In Do
It! Rubin asks, “How can you separate politics from sex? It’s all the same
thing: body politic.” Rubin rejects the “taught” imperative that “body pleasure
is immoral”: “Fucking” would liberate humanity. Freak activist Cynthia
“Cinderella” Cale-Binion’s liner notes to Permanent Damage valorize a
cathartic “menace to American maidenhood.” In “Trip without a Ticket,” Berg
insists that “a single circuit-breaking moment” would transform participants
into “life-actors.” Those who expressed and experienced Rubin’s “body
pleasure” on Berg’s “liberated ground” should have what Yippie activist Robin
Morgan, in 1969, called “a sudden and transforming insight”: recognizing
the contradiction between their personal desires and the plastic gratification
of modern U.S. life, they would become activists. In 1970, Cale-Binion and
Des Barres stressed dramatic, urgent stakes: because postindustrial society
would further commodify creativity and disembody pleasure, activists must
“do what you want to do, because it’s going to be too late soon.” In Revolution
for the Hell of It, Hoffman counsels the converted to “do your thing”: “Believe
in the politics of ecstasy.” In Do It! Rubin argues that “revolution is not what
you believe, what organization you belong to, or who you vote for—it’s what
you do all day, how you live.”6
In 1968, historian Theodore Roszak coined the term “counterculture” to
encompass “such troublesome children” as student radicals, LSD advocates,
and hippies. “Radical counterculture” indicates a narrower set of activists.
Freaks, Diggers, and Yippies emphasized culture as the primary target
of radical dissent and believed that robust, effective protest required the
expression and experience of pleasure in public. Des Barres’s liner notes to
Permanent Damage include every “joyful” thing “I see, hear, feel, or think” in
this “way of life.” To explore the ideologies, practices, and aesthetics of these
activists, I look at the music, dance, fashion, and art they created by examining
newspapers, magazines, albums, liner notes, broadsides, documentaries, and
photographs, as well as later memoirs and interviews. While countercultural
more readily with BPP activist Eldridge Cleaver. In 1968’s Soul on Ice, Cleaver
celebrates “way-out body-rhythms” and seems to indulge the argument that
white activists could transcend race: “Growing numbers of white youth are
repudiating their heritage of blood.” Cleaver also wrote the introduction to
Do It! where Rubin takes a mile from Cleaver’s inch: “Long hair is our black
skin. Long hair turns white middle-class youth into niggers.” Class and race
continuously inflected these coalitions.20
Radical countercultural ideologies, practices, and aesthetics had roots
in pop culture and intellectual, artistic, and avant-garde contexts that had
been apparent on the Left since World War One. Paulekas was a fashion
designer whose bohemian looks were popular with celebrities. Husband
Vito shared a studio with choreographer Jerome Robbins (per Franzoni,
they “would comp off of each other”) and benefacted Los Angeles bands.
The couple’s son was named for avant-garde writer Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot. Zappa championed avant-garde composers Igor Stravinsky and
Edgar Varèse; their work had informed and was informed by cubism,
Dada, and surrealism. Many Digger activists trained in R. G. Davis’s San
Francisco Mime Troupe; Davis celebrated commedia d’ell arte, Étienne
Decroux’s mime theory, and Auguste Rodin’s sculptural philosophy. Berg
admired the situationists and anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Kandel was a
prominent poet. Goldhaft and Lapiner were trained dancers. Goldhaft
later rooted Digger activism’s “anarchist beginnings” in anarchist Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon’s phrase “la propriété, c’est le vol!”: “property is theft!”
Hoffman took classes with social theorist Herbert Marcuse and psychologist
Abraham Maslow at Brandeis University. In Revolution for the Hell of It,
Hoffman includes these instructors in a list “of three M’s that would prove
very helpful” with communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. There are
also parallels with contemporary U.S. artists and theorists in the 1960s,
including choreographer Yvonne Rainer and performance studies innovator
Richard Schechner.21
Countercultural radicals frequently obfuscated these connections and
contexts. In Berg’s memory, Digger activists rejected “trying to tie things into
the historical tradition of left-anarchism” because “things were real when
people did them.” Coyote later agreed: “Part of the energy for the Haight was
this hunger for real experience.” Goldhaft later articulated the Digger belief
that “if you could act something out it would be real.” This anti-intellectualism
was disingenuous; Kandel later recalled that there was “a lot of work to it
all.” Developing dramaturgical frameworks for planned anarchy produced
overlapping and dichotomous intellectual ideas. Bodies were theatrical,
Notes
1. Jerry Hopkins, “GUAMBO Is an Act of Love: Mothers, Happenings, Dancing,” Los Angeles Free
Press, July 29, 1966, 6; Earl Leaf, “Freakout!” Teen, January 1967, 41–42; Mercy Fontenot, liner notes
to GTOs, Permanent Damage, Straight STS1059, 1969, 33-1/3 rpm.
2. Carl Franzoni, quoted in David Fricke, liner notes to Frank Zappa, MOFO: The Making of Freak
Out! Project/Object An FZ Audio Documentary, Zappa Records ZR20004, 2006, compact disc; Frank
Zappa, liner notes to Mothers of Invention, Freak Out! Verve/MGM V6/5005-2, 1966, 33-1/3 rpm;
Pamela Des Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Teenage Groupie (Chicago: Chicago Review,
1987), 80; Carl Franzoni, “A ‘Mother’ against LSD,” Los Angeles Free Press, October 7, 1966, 16; Gail
Zappa, quoted in Michael Walker, Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary
Neighborhood (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006), 31.
3. Frank Zappa, quoted in “Look Out Plastic People the Mothers Have Arrived,” KFWB/98
Hitline, December 8, 1965, 2; Mothers of Invention, “Plastic People,” Absolutely Free, Verve/MGM
V-5013, 1967, 33-1/3 rpm; Mothers of Invention, “Who Are the Brain Police?” Freak Out!; Mothers
of Invention, “Call Any Vegetable,” Absolutely Free; Mothers of Invention, “Uncle Bernie’s Farm,”
Absolutely Free; “Freak Out Hot Spots!” liner notes to Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!; Christine
Frka, liner notes to GTOs, Permanent Damage.
4. Christine Frka, quoted in “Freak Fashion,” AUM, May 1969, 30; Zappa, liner notes to Mothers
of Invention, Freak Out!; Carl Franzoni, interview by John Trubee, “Last of the Freaks: The Carl
Franzoni Story,” Scram, February 2003, http://scrammagazine.com/carl-franzoni-last-of-the-freaks,
accessed June 20, 2018; Frank Zappa, quoted in Leaf, “Freakout!” 42.
5. “A-Political or, Criminal or Victim or or or or or or or,” September 30, 1966, broadside, Digger
Archives, http://diggers.org/images/dp004_m.jpg, accessed June 20, 2018; “The Ideology of Failure,”
Berkeley Barb, November 18, 1966, 6; Peter Berg, “Trip without a Ticket,” 1966, reproduced in The
Digger Papers, August 3, 1968, 3, Digger Archives, http:// diggers.org/diggers/digger_papers_1968.
pdf, accessed June 20, 2018; Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial, 1968),
57; Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 94; Szou
Paulekas, interview by Alan Whicker, “Love Generation,” Whicker’s World, BBC, aired September
9, 1967; Lenore Kandel, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco, directed by Céline Deransart and
Alice Gaillard (1998; Éditions L’échappée, 2009), DVD.
6. Rubin, Do It! 111; Cynthia Cale-Binion, liner notes to GTOs, Permanent Damage; Berg, “Trip
without a Ticket,” 3; Robin Morgan, quoted in Peter Babcox, “Meet the Women of the Revolution,
1969,” New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1969, 87; Cynthia Cale-Binion and Pamela Des Barres,
quoted in “A GTO Is an Average,” IT, June 18, 1970, 4; Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 10, 59;
Rubin, Do It! 115.
7. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and
Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 30; Pamela Des Barres, liner
notes to GTOs, Permanent Damage.
8. Rubin, Do It! 89; Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” Rat: Subterranean News, February 6,
1970, reproduced in Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York:
Random House, 1978), 125, 127.
9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Pantheon, 1978), 4, 10; “Cool Cranberry Horsehaired Mouth Cluttered with Apple Cores,”
1966, broadside, Digger Archives, http://diggers.org/images/dp005_m.jpg, accessed June 20, 2018;
“In Search of a Frame,” Berkeley Barb, November 25, 1966, 6; Billy Murcott, “Mutants Commune,”
Berkeley Barb, August 18, 1967, 8.
10. Murcott, “Mutants Commune, 1; “Let Me Live in a World Pure,” September 1966, broadside,
Digger Archives, http://diggers.org/images/dp003_m.jpg, accessed June 20, 2018; Kandel, interview,
Les Diggers de San Francisco; Murcott, “Mutant’s Commune,” 8, 14.
11. Nancy Kurshan, interview by Jonah Raskin, “‘Fearless’ Yippie Pioneer Nancy Kurshan Battles
Prison Behemoth,” Rag Blog, February 28, 2013, http://theragblog.com/interview-jonah-raskin
-fearless-yippie-pioneer-nancy-kurshan-battles-prison-behemoth, accessed June 20, 2018.
12. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New
York: Harper and Row, 1984), 300–301, 303, 499; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of
Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 229, 237; Arthur Miller, introduction to Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage
Sale (New York: Viking, 1973), xvi; Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The
Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 159, 232–33. See also William L.
O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (New York: Times Press, 1971);
Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS: The Rise and Development of Students for a Democratic Society (New York:
Random House, 1973); David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); W.
J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jack Whalen
and Richard Flacks, Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1989); Stewart Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy
(Boston: Twayne, 1990); Edward P. Morgan, The Sixties Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern
America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); David Chalmers, “The Struggle for Social
Change in 1960s America: A Bibliographic Essay,” American Studies International 30, no. 1 (1992):
41–64; David Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern America (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1995); David Burner, Making Peace with the 60s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
Paul Lyons, New Left, New Right, and the Legacy of the Sixties (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1996); James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (New York:
Routledge, 1997); Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Counterculture, Business Culture, and the
Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Doug Rossinow, “The New
Left in the Counterculture: Hypotheses and Evidence,” Radical History Review 67 (1997): 79–120;
Dominick Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1999).
13. Julie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27; Bradford D. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics
and Performance in Sixties America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 5; Abbie
Hoffman, “The Yippies Are Going to Chicago,” Realist, September 1968, 1; “Where Is PUBLIC at?”
1966, broadside, Digger Archives, http://diggers.org/images/dp001_m.jpg, accessed June 20, 2018.
See also Michael William Doyle, “The Haight-Ashbury Diggers and the Cultural Politics of Utopia,
1965–1968” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1997); David McBride, “On the Fault Line of Mass Cul-
ture and Counterculture: A Social History of the Hippie Counterculture in 1960s Los Angeles” (PhD
diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998); Leerom Medovoi, “A Yippie-Panther Pipe Dream:
Rethinking Sex, Race, and the Sexual Revolution,” in Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the
1960s, ed. Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett, 133–78 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999); Peter Braunstein and Michael Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of
the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Routledge, 2002); Kathryn Kerr Fenn, “Daughters of the Revolution,
Mothers of the Counterculture: Rock and Roll Groupies in the 1960s and 1970s” (PhD diss., Duke
University, 2002); John McMillan and Paul Buhle, eds., The New Left Revisited (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2003); Jill Katherine Silos, “Everybody Get Together: The Sixties Counterculture
and Public Space, 1964–1967” (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 2003); Tim Hodgdon,
Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965–83 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Susanne Elizabeth Shawyer, “Radical Street Theatre and
the Yippie Legacy: A Performance History of the Youth International Party, 1967–1968” (PhD diss.,
University of Texas, Austin, 2008); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius: Women of
the Sixties Counterculture (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009); Elissa Auther and Adam
Lerner, eds., West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and
the Politics of Pleasure (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Michael J. Kramer, The
Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013); Craig J. Peariso, Radical Theatrics: Put-ons, Politics, and the Sixties (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2014).
14. Peter Coyote, quoted in Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents: My Life
inside Rock and Out (New York: De Capo Press, 1992), 184; Peter Coyote, interview, Leonard Wolf,
Voices from the Love Generation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 118; Mothers of Invention, “Trouble
Every Day,” Freak Out!; Frank Zappa, quoted in John Lannan, “Frank Zappa,” SoCal, March 3 1969,
4; Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” 129–30; Rubin, Do It! 90–91, 113.
15. Rubin, Do It!, 82, 113, 115; Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 61–62; Florynce Kennedy,
quoted in Robin Morgan, “Miss America Goes Down,” Rat: Subterranean News, October 3, 1968, 4.
16. Judy Albert, “Red Diaper Yippie,” Yippie Girl, n.d., http://yippiegirl.com/articles-reddiaper
.html, accessed June 20, 2018; Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle (Berkeley, CA:
Counterpoint, 1998), 71; “Delving the Diggers,” Berkeley Barb, October 21, 1966, 3; Nina Blasenheim,
interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco; Judy Goldhaft, “Death of Money: Diggers 50 Years Later,”
Shaping San Francisco, podcast audio, October 26, 2015, https://archive.org/details/Diggers50th
AnniversaryOct262015, accessed June 20, 2018; Kandel, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco.
17. Pamela Des Barres, quoted in Walker, Laurel Canyon, 29; Peter Berg, “Draft Letter from
Peter Berg (?) to an Underground Newspaper, n.d., ca. 1967,” Digger Archives, http://diggers.org/
pb_to_up.htm, accessed June 20, 2018; Goldhaft, “Death of Money”; Jane Lapiner, “Death of Money.”
18. Goldhaft, “Death of Money”; Frank Zappa, “Paid Advertisement,” Los Angeles Free Press,
September 16, 1966, 10; Frank Zappa, “Freak Out Official News of the M.O.I.,” Los Angeles Free
Press, October 14, 1966, 14; Paulekas, interview by Whicker, “Love Generation”; Emmett Grogan,
Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (New York: Little, Brown, 1972), 237; Rubin, Do It! 98, 168.
19. Blasenheim, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco; Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius,
36.
20. Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party
in Oakland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 79; David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This
Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1993), 147, 158, 182, 257; Huey P. Newton, interview by Stew Albert, “Huey Ons [sic]
Yippies,” Berkeley Barb, October 4, 1968, 8; Eldridge Cleaver, “The White Race and Its Heroes,” in
Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), 81; Rubin, Do It! 94.
21. Franzoni, interview by Trubee, “Last of the Freaks”; Goldhaft, “Death of Money”; Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la Propriété?, ou, Recherche Sur le Principe du Droit et du Gouvernement
(Paris: J.F. Brocard, 1840), 2; Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 175. See also R. G. Davis, “Guerrilla
Theater,” Tulane Drama Review 10 (1966): 130–36; “Ett Situationistiskt Manifest,” Internationale
Situationniste #4, June 1960; Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: McClure
Phillips, 1902); Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston:
Beacon, 1955); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,”
Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–96; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964); Yvonne Rainer, interview by Liza Béar and Willoughby
Sharp, “The Performer as a Persona: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer,” Avalanche (Summer 1972):
46–59; Richard Schechner, “Guerilla Theatre: May 1970,” Drama Review 14, no. 3 (1970): 163–68.
More broadly, see Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor,
1961); Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The
New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
22. Peter Berg, interview by Marty Lee and Eric Noble, “Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft,” April 29,
1982, San Francisco, Digger Archives, http://diggers.org/oralhistory/pb_jg_0482.htm, accessed June
20, 2018; Coyote, quoted in Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 186; Goldhaft, “Death
of Money”; Kandel, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco; Hoffman, “The Yippies Are Going
to Chicago,” 1; Rubin, Do It! 111; Peter Berg, interview, Wolf, Voices from the Love Generation,
249–50.
23. “Where Is PUBLIC at?”; Zappa, liner notes to Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!; Mothers of
Invention, “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” Freak Out!; Rubin, Do It! 19.
24. “In Search of a Frame,” 6; Kandel, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco; Judy Goldhaft,
interview by Lee and Noble, “Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft”; Lapiner, “Death of Money”; Peter
Coyote, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco; Rubin, Do It! 115; Berg, “Trip without a Ticket,” 4.
25. Goldhaft, interview by Lee and Noble; Grogan, Ringolevio, 452; Lapiner, “Death of Money”;
Judy Goldhaft, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco.
26. “Public Nonsense Nuisance Public Essence Newsense Public News,” October 29, 1966,
broadside, Digger Archives, http://diggers.org/images/dp002_m.jpg, accessed June 20, 2018; “Diggers
New Game: The Frame,” Berkeley Barb, November 4, 1966, 5.
27. Grogan, Ringolevio, 276; Coyote, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco; Lapiner, “Death of
Money”; Goldhaft, “Death of Money.”
28. Kurshan, interview by Raskin, “‘Fearless’ Yippie Pioneer”; Michael Stern, untitled, New York
Times, March 24, 1968; “Youth: The Politics of YIP,” Time, April 5, 1968; Rubin, Do It! 189; Jim Fouratt,
interview, Ron Chepesiuk, Sixties Radicals, Then and Now: Candid Conversations with Those Who
Shaped the Era (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), 218; Peter Coyote, “Playing for Keeps,” Digger
Archives, n.d., http://diggers.org/freefall/forkeeps.html, accessed June 20, 2018; Hoffman, Revolution
for the Hell of It, 70; Sally Kempton, “Sunday in the Park: Yip Out or Has Been,” Village Voice, April
18, 1968, 1, 18.
29. Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 10, 59, 79–80, 92, 183; Rubin, Do It! 82, 147; Hoffman,
“The Yippies Are Going to Chicago,” 24.
30. Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 66, 75, 80; Gene Youngblood, “Mother Is a Mother
Is a Mother Is a Mother,” Los Angeles Free Press, June 21, 1968, 33; Robin Morgan, “Introduction:
The Women’s Revolution,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s
Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970), xvii.
31. Frank Zappa, interview by Frank Kofsky, “The Mothers of Invention, Part II,” Jazz & Pop,
October 1967, 29; Judy Albert, interview by Thorne Dreyer, “Yippie Pioneers Judy Gumbo Albert
and Nancy Kurshan ‘Tell It like It Was,’” Rag Blog, podcast audio, April 13, 2013, http://theragblog
.com/rag-radio-thorne-dreyer-yippie-pioneers-judy-gumbo-albert-and-nancy-kurshan-tell-it-like
-it-was, accessed June 20, 2018; Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 79.
32. Des Barres, I’m with the Band, 50; Cale-Binion, liner notes to GTOs, Permanent Damage; Des
Barres, quoted in Walker, Laurel Canyon, 29; Goldhaft, “Death of Money.”
33. Mothers of Invention, “Mom & Dad,” We’re Only in It for the Money, Verve/MGM V6–5045,
1968, 33-1/3 rpm; GTOs, “T.V. Lives,” Permanent Damage; Rubin, Do It! 83; Hoffman, Revolution
for the Hell of It, 80; Goldhaft, “Death of Money.”
34. Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 80; Rubin, Do It! 96; Leaf, “Freakout!” 42–43; Cathy J.
Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (1997): 437–65, at 458.
35. “Free City,” Free City News, 1967, Digger Archives, http://diggers.org/images/freecity/fc_b12_l.
jpg, accessed June 20, 2018; “October Sixth Nineteen Hundred and Sixty Seven,” October 6, 1967,
broadside, Digger Archives, http://diggers.org/images/freecity/fc_c01_l.jpg, accessed June 20, 2018.
36. Hodgdon, Manhood in the Age of Aquarius, 73; Kandel, interview, Les Diggers de San Francisco;
Rubin, Do It!; Robin Morgan, Saturday’s Child: A Memoir (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 237.
37. “Flower Power Smothers,” San Francisco Express Times, February 29, 1968, 8; Lenore Kandel,
interview, Wolf, Voices from the Love Generation, 34; Lenore Kandel, “God/Love Poem,” The Love
Book (San Francisco: Stolen Paper Review Editions, 1966), 1; “The Story of Man,” Free City News,
http://diggers.org/images/freecity/fc_a06al.jpg, accessed June 20, 2018; Herbert Marcuse, “Political
Preface 1966,” in Eros and Civilization, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1966), xv; Cleaver, “The Primeval
Mitosis,” in Soul on Ice, 177; Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 66; Goldhaft, “Death of Money.”
38. Mothers of Invention, “Plastic People,” Absolutely Free. For two twenty-first-century examples
of the invocation of Yippie activism as a left-wing bogeyman, see Aaron Sorkin and Gideon Yago,
The Newsroom, “The 112th Congress,” HBO, aired July 8, 2012; Jeffrey Lord, interview by Anderson
Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360°, CNN, aired November 15, 2015.
39. Morgan, “Miss America Goes Down,” 4; “The WITCH Manifesto,” 1968, reproduced in
Sisterhood is Powerful, 539–40; Amy Uyematsu, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,”
GIDRA, October 1969, 8; “Workshop Resolutions—First National Chicana Conference,” reproduced
in Women, New Voice of La Raza: Chicanas Speak Out, ed. Mirta Vidal (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1971), 13.
40. Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” presentation, Berkshire Conference
on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978, reproduced in Audre Lorde, Sister
Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984), 53; Emily K. Hobson, “‘Si Nicaragua
Venció’: Lesbian and Gay Solidarity with the Revolution,” Journal of Transnational American Studies
4, no. 2 (2012): 1–16, at 4; Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 87; Grogan, Ringolevio, 498; “The
Underground Press Syndicate Is a Self-Indulgent Bore & Rigged-Up Bullshit Fraud,” Free City News,
n.d., http://diggers.org/images/freecity/fc_b11al.jpg, accessed June 20, 2018; “October Sixth Nineteen
Hundred and Sixty Seven”; Frka, liner notes to GTOs, Permanent Damage.