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“Sometimes Grotesque, Often Beautiful”: Pleasure, Performance, and Protest in the

Radical Counterculture, 1965–69


Author(s): Mark Abraham
Source: Journal of Civil and Human Rights , Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2018), pp. 6-30
Published by: University of Illinois Press

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“Sometimes Grotesque,
Often Beautiful”
Pleasure, Performance, and Protest
in the Radical Counterculture, 1965–69

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.

F rom 1965 to 1969, Los Angeles club-­goers on West Hollywood’s Sun-


set Strip encountered an extraordinary spectacle: the freaks, a radical
countercultural collective of outrageously dressed dancers, would stream
onto the dance floor and freak out. The Los Angeles Free Press described one
freak-­out in 1966:
Masks made of flowers glued to faces, glasses covered with butterflies, a hexagonal
box collaged with contrasting images of humanism and Vietnam slaughter, faces

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

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Fall/Winter 2018    Journal of Civil and Human Rights   7

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.

Guided by choreographer Vito Paulekas, freak activists expressed and


experienced pleasure via uninhibited gyration. In 1967, a freak exposé in
Teen captured this movement: “They shout, sing, moan, twist themselves
into pretzel shapes, jump in the air or shake, rattle, and roll.” Teen concluded
that freaks and freak-­outs were “sometimes grotesque, often beautiful.” Freak
activist Mercy Fontenot’s liner notes to Permanent Damage, a 1969 album
by Los Angeles rock band the GTOs, reiterate the same dichotomy: “Beauty
and ugliness, we are supreme, yet the gutter.”1
Freak-­outs were protests. In freak activist Carl Franzoni’s memory,
Paulekas dubbed this performed dissent “planned anarchy”: “You plan a
situation. Then the ‘freak out’ comes when one guy does something, you do
something else, and another guy over there picks up on that.” Freak activist
Frank Zappa’s liner notes to Freak Out! the 1966 debut album by Los Angeles
rock band the Mothers of Invention, elaborate:
When any number of “freaks” gather and express themselves creatively through
music or dance . . . the participants, already emancipated from our national
social slavery, dressed in their most inspired apparel, realize as a group whatever
potential they possess for free expression.

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

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8  Abraham

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

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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

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10  Abraham

radicals were geographically fragmented and ideologically diverse, they


collectively forged an effective, durable fusion of pleasure, performance,
and protest between 1965 and 1969.7
This article covers a phase of the radical counterculture dominated by
middle-­class white nondisabled cisgender nonintersex heterosexual activists.
Many of these activists were Jewish or from an Eastern European background.
Some were over the age of thirty (Rubin praises “permanent adolescents” in
Do It!). Women shaped freak, Digger, and Yippie ideologies, practices, and
aesthetics, but their contemporaneous press—and the historiography since—
largely celebrates their male counterparts. The year 1969 is a useful bookend.
By 1968, freak and Digger collective activism stultified. Yippie activism
continued into the 1970s, but high-­profile Yippie activists like Morgan and Jim
Fouratt exited the group in 1968. Morgan formed the radical feminist WITCH
in 1968; Fouratt joined the Gay Liberation Front in 1969. Concurrently,
elements of the radical counterculture’s fusion of pleasure, performance, and
protest were adopted and adapted by working-­class activists; Black, Latinx,
Asian, Arab, and Native activists; activists with disabilities; trans activists;
and bisexual, lesbian, and gay male activists across the United States. Morgan
formalized this shift in February 1970 in “Goodbye to All That,” an editorial
that dismisses Rubin as a “clown” and Hoffman as a “tattered” hypocrite,
synthesizes an emerging critique of the counterculture of the late 1960s, and
provides a template to adopt and adapt radical countercultural tactics in new
ways.8
A sustained critique of the radical counterculture is not the focus of this
article; however, it informs my analysis. Countercultural radicals anticipated
philosopher and historian Michel Foucault’s argument in 1976’s The History
of Sexuality that “the repressive hypothesis”—the perception that bourgeois
“prudishness” unilaterally represses sexuality through “prohibitions” and
“censorship”—did not capture the complex, diffuse relationship between
pleasure and power. They lambasted the generic, perceived pleasures of the
sexual revolution and consumer culture as patterns of social control that
complacent U.S. Americans lauded and maintained to cement their position in
the social order. But they also believed that their identities and their pleasures,
once liberated from what a 1966 Digger broadside calls “an awful frenzy of
collapsed assumptions,” were, in Digger argot from the Berkeley Barb, “joyous
and free.” Consequently, countercultural radicals merely dipped a collective
toe in the water of poststructuralism. Their inchoate social constructionism
allowed them paradoxically to autopsy the “pre-­fabricated” bodies that
Murcott calls “programmed corpses” in 1967’s “Mutants Commune” as false

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witnesses for plastic gratification while uncritically imagining their own


“natural” bodies as authenticity corporealized.9
In addition to being paradoxical, radical countercultural attempts to
“create free forms”—Murcott’s phrase—were notably contradictory. Words
already quoted in this article, including “freak,” “lunacy,” “emancipation,”
and “slavery,” are just the tip of the iceberg of classist, racist, ageist, ableist,
cissexist, intersexist, sexist, and heterosexist language that countercultural
radicals used in ill-­considered attempts to reify the authenticity of their own
bodies. They argued that activists could and should transcend class, race, and
age: as a 1966 Digger broadside claims, “No more negroes, jews, christians.
There is only one minority in America.” But while they paid lip service to
Kandel’s “incredible variety of unbelievable actions,” they resisted same-­sex
expressions and experiences out of hand and made inconsistent arguments
about transcending disability and gender. Countercultural radicals believed
that real and imagined associations with working-­class bodies, bodies of
color, young bodies, certain bodies with disabilities, certain trans bodies,
certain nonbinary bodies, and certain intersex bodies would revolutionize
their bodies; however, real and imagined associations with bisexual bodies,
lesbian bodies, gay male bodies, certain bodies with disabilities, certain trans
bodies, certain nonbinary bodies, and certain intersex bodies could not.
Though Murcott demanded that activists shed their “fixed identity horseshit”
and repudiate “horizontal and vertical pyramid hierarchies” to be “free in
nitty-­gritty marrow soul,” a fixed identity nevertheless emerged: a radical
countercultural alternative norm (rather than an alternative to norms) that
claimed most but privileged middle-­class white nondisabled cisgender
nonintersex heterosexual activists.10
The radical counterculture’s articulation of pleasure, performance,
and protest has been unfairly obscured in the prevailing treatment of the
counterculture by historians of mainstream liberalism, civil rights activism,
and the New Left. According to the still-­dominant narrative of the history
of the 1960s, the heroic social movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s,
exemplified by civil rights, student activism, and the work of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), were followed by the divisive and destructive rise of radical
protest, cultural nationalism, identity politics, and unserious countercultural
activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 2013, Yippie activist Nancy
Kurshan recalled, “Most Left history is written by people who were in what
we considered the ‘straight Left.’ They were not fond of us then and they still
aren’t.”11

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12  Abraham

Preaughts political histories of the 1960s often use the radical


counterculture’s emphasis on pleasure to dismiss it as a colorful-­but-­naïve
footnote to the history of the New Left. In 1984’s The Unraveling of America,
historian Allen J. Matusow’s single paragraph on the Diggers dwells on
Grogan. Matusow describes Grogan as “sinister,” “paranoid,” “secretive,” and
“violent”: “An anarchist moved less by visions of the beloved community
than by hatred of all authority.” The footnote lists one source: Grogan’s 1972
memoir Ringolevio, annotated “use with caution.” Matusow concludes that
“drugs, sex, and rock and roll lacked intrinsic moral content.” In 1987’s The
Sixties, sociologist Todd Gitlin, a former SDS leader, rates the Diggers as
“our anarchist bad conscience” and derides the Yippies via a quote from
playwright Arthur Miller: “If responsibility can be reached through pleasure,
then something new is on the earth.” In 2000’s America Divided, historians
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin call the Haight-­Ashbury a “village with
no moral center” and the Yippies “apostles of comic revolution”: “Hardly
any of this was serious.” At best, such accounts diminish the contributions
of freak, Digger, and Yippie activists as interestingly articulated ideas that
were merely complementary to serious politics. At worst, the navel-­gazing
counterculture distracted true radicals from serious politics and helped
fracture the Movement into movements.12
In the late 1990s, a new historiography of the counterculture began
to outline its syntagmatic and symbiotic relationship with the New Left.
In 1998’s Anti-­Disciplinary Protest, sociologist Julie Stephens explores
“the ‘overlap’ between the New Left and the counterculture.” In 2004’s
The Theater Is in the Street, American studies scholar Bradford D. Martin
argues that Digger activism was “characteristic of both the New Left and the
counterculture.” This rich scholarship crucially expands our understanding
of the counterculture; however, its approach can feel like an attempt to fit the
square peg of the counterculture into the round hole of the New Left. A small
enough peg fits, but the resulting analysis tends to emphasize similarities
that parallel, and therefore privilege, New Left strategies of dissent. Radical
countercultural writing only occasionally supports this interpretation—for
example, Hoffman promised “a cross-­fertilization of the hippie and New Left
philosophy” in 1968. A preponderance of evidence, however, demonstrates
that countercultural radicals did not view their ideologies and practices as a
modest mixture of New Left and hippie politics. To take this view seriously,
we must acknowledge that not all strategies of dissent or forms of protest
are comprehensible within the conventional frameworks of political and
social history—especially when said frameworks are often ambivalent

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Fall/Winter 2018    Journal of Civil and Human Rights   13

about sexuality as an important subject of historical inquiry. The radical


counterculture viewed pleasure as an important, serious subject. As a 1966
Digger broadside asks, “Where in the street can two fingers touch?”13
Radical countercultural ideologies opposed liberal and New Left
ideologies. They rejected the worldview of New Deal, Square Deal, Middle
Way, New Frontier, and Great Society policies that focused on empowering
breadwinning men. In Digger activist Peter Coyote’s recollection, the problem
was not “capitalism” or “communism”: it was “culture.” In 1968, Coyote
belittled New Left activists as “credit-­card revolutionaries.” In 1966’s “Trouble
Every Day,” Zappa draws a distinction between an embodied “fire in the
heart” and the “stupidity” of a “fire in the street.” In 1969, Zappa dismissed
“unimaginative” student activism as a “beginner’s carnival type of revolution.”
In “Goodbye to All That,” Morgan calls the “counterfeit Left” a “cracked-­
glass-­mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare.” In Do It! Rubin jokes
that student activists kept “waiting for the workers to come to the university.”
In a period marked by violent militarism, urban protests, police curfews,
and political brutality, Rubin believed that pleasure was more powerful
than SDS shibboleths about revolution: “Kids who grew up in the post-­
1950s live in a world of supermarkets, color TV commercials, guerrilla war,
international media, psychedelics, rock ‘n’ roll, and moon walks.” Pivoting off
these ideas and capturing the excitement and possibility associated with new
technological advances, new forms of cultural media, and new political and
social uncertainty in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rubin gleefully asserts,
“For us nothing is impossible.”14
Radical countercultural ideologies explicitly linked pleasure, performance,
and protest. Rubin echoes a claim made by many countercultural radicals
between 1965 and 1969: “We create the revolution by living it.” Do It! defines
“Yippie” as “the sound of surging through the streets.” The New Left missed
the mark: “Theoretical bullshit, boring meetings. . . . Who’s going to give his
life to a movement with that kind of come-­on?” In Revolution for the Hell of
It, Hoffman agrees: “I don’t like the concept of a movement built on sacrifice,
dedication, responsibility, anger, frustration, and guilt.” Hoffman prefers
“an experience so intense that you actualize.” In 1968, Morgan recounted an
analogy by activist Florynce Kennedy to clarify the point: “Throwing a brick
through the window of a police station” was less effective than “peeing on
an expensive rug at a polite cocktail party” because “the Man never expects
the second kind of protest.”15
Making sense of an ideology of pleasure was challenging and rewarding.
Yippie activist Judy Albert later mused that it was initially difficult to “grasp

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14  Abraham

the essence of ironic Yippie politics” because of “my tendency to take


everything literally.” Coyote’s memoir recounts a similar struggle at a Digger
Free Food performance in October 1966. Free Food used deceptively simple
staging: daily, for six months, Digger activists provided food to people who
joined them in the Panhandle, a Haight-­Ashbury park. Coyote refused food,
assuming others might need it more. Coyote notes Grogan’s response: “‘That’s
not the point,’ he said, and his words pried open a door in my mind.” Coyote
continues, “If you wanted to live in a world with free food, then create it and
participate in it. Feeding people was not an act of charity.” A 1966 Digger
article asserts, “It’s free because it’s yours.” Digger activist Nina Blasenheim
later argued, “We provided food so that people could have a free life.” Digger
activist Judy Goldhaft later outlined questions that participants and passersby
might “reconsider”: “Who are you? Is your identity a consumer? Who does
the stuff belong too?” This work could be exhilarating or exhausting. As
Kandel later recalled, “Some people will simply sit there with their hands
out waiting and they’ll never pick it up for themselves.”16
While aspects of their ideologies were shared by the broad publics of West
Hollywood, the Haight-­Ashbury, and the Lower East Side, countercultural
radicals were sharply critical of bohemians that they perceived to be apolitical.
Des Barres later celebrated taking pride in calculated style: “A hippie was sort
of the unwashed, unkempt kid. A freak was someone who put a lot of care
and intention into their appearance, wanting to stand out instead of blend
in.” We can clock the vanity here—Des Barres is making a broad distinction
of taste between West Hollywood and Haight-­Ashbury street style—but this
“care and intention,” conceptualized as more precise and more radical than
that of your typical Haight denizen, was echoed by Digger activists in the
Haight. In 1967, reacting to the popularization of hippie aesthetics by Haight
merchants, Berg dismissively wrote, “Dropping out does not mean changing
clothes.” Goldhaft later argued that Digger style rejected the 1950s orthodoxy
that clothing “defined your class.” Countercultural radicals asserted their
styled bodies against what Digger activist Jane Lapiner later disparaged
as the “commercialization of an idea”: an attempt by local and national
corporate interests to co-­opt and conflate the diversity of youth rebellion
into a profitable, apolitical trend.17
This emphasis on intention complicates the pervasive anti-­ideological
association of the counterculture with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Yes,
countercultural radicals espoused nonmarital and nonmonogamous cross-­
sex arrangements. Yes, Goldhaft later enthused that “rock ‘n’ roll went into
our cellular DNA and made us move our bodies.” But freak, Digger, and

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Yippie activists agreed, as Zappa cautioned in September 1966, that hedonism


required a “reason” to foment “active freedom.” In October, Zappa bluntly
reiterated: “We are here to turn you loose. Not turn you on.” For this reason,
many countercultural radicals repudiated drug use. On Whicker’s World,
Paulekas appealed to activists to do “something where you don’t have to
sit in a corner.” Digger activists used drugs, but most believed, as Grogan
muses in 1972’s Ringolevio, that LSD “offered no moral direction.” In contrast,
Yippie activists, most concerned with media optics, argued that drug use
was a potent symbol of the revolution. In Do It! Rubin writes, “Marijuana
makes each person God.” Where freak and Digger activists valorized sober
liberation, Rubin celebrates “dropping LSD in the water supply.”18
Countercultural radicals forged local and national coalitions. Freak
activists worked with artists, musicians, and student activists. Digger
activists worked with Haight merchants and formed relationships with
Berkeley radicals, the Black Panther Party (BPP), and Hells Angels to map, in
Blasenheim’s memory, “a bigger free city.” Yippie activists had roots in SNCC,
the Vietnam Day Committee, and Manhattan’s radical art scene; they formed
coalitions with New Left organizations and the BPP while coordinating
protests for the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
These coalitions bolstered the radical counterculture’s ability to organize
locally and nationally. But as historian Gretchen Lemke-­Santangelo argues,
these coalitions also indicate “a fascination with supposedly more authentic,
unrepressed others.” Coalitions with Hells Angels and the BPP were attempts
to glean an aura of legitimacy through association with working-­class activists
and activists of color.19
Radical countercultural relations with the BPP demonstrate that such
coalitions were uneasy. Historian Robyn C. Spencer’s observation that white
Left–BPP coalitions featured “an undercurrent of self-­interest” characterizes
the interactions of Digger and Yippie activists with the BPP: countercultural
radicals desired “an entrée into the black community.” BPP activist David
Hilliard’s autobiography praises Grogan for lacking an “eager-­to-­please
liberal” attitude and suggests that the BPP’s Free Breakfast for School
Children Program was inspired by Grogan’s donations of “beans and rice”
but also mocks Grogan: “He thinks he can teach me about the streets.” Hilliard
praises Albert and husband Stew for having “a richer sense of humor than”
SDS leader Tom Hayden but dismisses Yippie protests as “pranks.” In 1968,
BPP activist Huey P. Newton was also lukewarm, arguing that Yippie activists
“shouldn’t be abstract”; they should prioritize “political direction” over
“individualistic anarchism,” an expression of white privilege. Rubin jelled

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16  Abraham

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,

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musical, moveable, and stylable mediums for protest. Bodies performed


revolution and postrevolution. The inanimate bodies valued by middle-­class
culture were also performances. Performance was expression and experience.
Such contradictions were features, not bugs. In 1968, Hoffman asserted that
sacrificing “precision” created “a greater degree of suggestion.” In Do It! Rubin
agrees: any “contradictions” were “the genius of making a revolution.” In
1968, Berg argued that there was only one viable explanation for revolution,
anyhow. The “intellectual abstractions” crafted by historians to explain French
or Russian “revolutionary fervor” in 1789 and 1917 missed the point: “They
were doing it to accommodate their desire.”22
In practice, in musical, visual, and written contexts, countercultural
radicals communicated authentic experience with sexual imagery. “Where
Is PUBLIC at?,” a 1966 Digger broadside, celebrates public parks where “you
can pitch a tent anytime”: Digger activists wanted to foster this “ERECTION
and give meaning to its eventual climax.” In Freak Out!’s liner notes, Zappa
describes “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” a song for which two
hundred freak activists recorded shouts, cries, and exhalations, as “what
freaks sound like.” The song opens with Zappa asking “Suzy Creamcheese,”
a fictional stand-­in for middle-­class youth, “What’s got into you?” This
question is a double-­entendre; the song is subtitled “Ritual Dance of the
Child Killer.” This sonic freak-­out’s climax occurs when Creamcheese’s
virginity is sacrificed to the revolution. In Do It! Rubin argues that “the back
seat produced the sexual revolution” despite the middle class “attacking our
gonads.” What could be more radical, countercultural radicals repeatedly
asked, than freely expressing and experiencing the very energy that modern
U.S. life was structured to mitigate, cordon, and siphon? Could Kropotkin
ever be as powerful as an orgasm?23
Similarly, in practice, countercultural radicals refused to rationalize their
performances. A 1966 Digger article explains that changing one’s “frame of
reference” depended on “the resolution of contradictions between knowledge
and action.” This was a provocative assertion: bodies that expressed and
experienced pleasure would instinctually reject middle-­class imperatives to
resolve the contradiction of modern U.S. life. In Kandel’s memory, the goal
was to reach beyond “people who already agreed.” New converts required
“fantasies”: “the hidden and overt minds of the people.” Performances were
enticingly staged in high-­traffic areas. As Goldhaft later explained, “We
picked a certain amount of props and a certain amount of structure without
demanding anything of anybody.” Passersby found the contradictions inherent
in the performance of intimate activities in public compelling; iterated acts

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18  Abraham

like mealtime were rendered opaque and familiar. In Lapiner’s recollection,


these stages invited people to “do whatever was going to happen next.” Or, as
Coyote subsequently reasoned, “An act explains itself.” For passersby, Rubin’s
“come-­on” was a promise of orgasm: what Berg, in “Trip without a Ticket,”
calls “special public feelings and held human communion.”24
These practiced obfuscations disguised organization and preparation.
Goldhaft later acknowledged “ideas,” an “outline,” and “our script” but also
valued things “we didn’t expect.” Free Food is an example of this synthesis of
plans and anarchy. Monetary donations were lit on fire. Police officers who
asked for the person in charge were declared the boss. A large yellow doorway,
the “Free Frame of Reference,” was erected next to the serving stations.
Food underlined Grogan’s assertion in Ringolevio that society should be
“free, autonomous, and classlessly equal!” In Lapiner’s memory, Free Food’s
dependence on cheap or free market leftovers created humorous shared
experiences: “We ate so many chicken wings.” Food became a synecdoche
for an array of questions about society and culture. Had capitalism and
liberalism failed the United States by denying individuals equal access to
necessary staples? What could or should the use of public space be? Could
a daily community gathering stem the isolation of modern U.S. life? In
Goldhaft’s memory, “doing things within the time frame of now” amplified
these questions’ immediacy while reducing the need for coherent or detailed
answers.25
On October 31, 1966, Digger activists again put these ideas into practice
with a new performance. They invited San Franciscans to the intersection
of Haight and Masonic to participate in “the Intersection Game.” A
mimeographed broadside suggested that participants walk the intersection
by tracing the various shapes formed by drawing diagonal lines from each
corner. A diagram was provided, along with the direction “don’t wait don’t
walk” and a list of alternatives: “Umbrella step, stroll, cake-­walk, sombersault
[sic], finger-­crawl, squat-­jump, pilgrimmage [sic], philly dog, etc.” The
Intersection Game attacked assumptions about social freedom and public
space. The intersection became a destination where members of the public
could interact with each other instead of “machines.” The broadside defines
“the Public” as “any fool on the street,” sarcastically suggesting, “Only a
fool walks in traffic.” Fools were revolutionaries who recognized that even
mundane rules maintained the dominant order. According to the Berkeley
Barb, participants and passersby, including “kids with jack-­o’-­lanterns” and
“Halloween costumes,” embraced foolishness: they stopped traffic and staged
a joyous block party.26

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Digger activists distinguished their practices from broad countercultural


events like the Human Be-­In. Held on January 14, 1967, the Be-­In was intended
by its organizers, including Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and members of the
Haight Independent Proprietors Association, to be a massive happening,
a celebration of Haight-­Ashbury culture that would double as a national
cotillion for the hip lifestyle. Digger activists saw the intentions of these
organizers far more cynically. In Ringolevio, Grogan dismisses the Be-­In
as a “Love Hoax” intended to “develop new markets for the merchandising
of . . . crap.” Coyote later critiqued the hierarchy created by the stage: “The
people were separated from the stars.” Lapiner later chastised “irresponsible”
Haight leaders for inviting an influx of runaways and weekend tourists to San
Francisco without “thought to any infrastructure.” Digger activists believed
that the Be-­In merely offered participants what was advertised on the tin:
sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. As nothing more than a premature celebration
of the legacy of ageing hipsters, the Be-­In could not provide an experiential
stage where people could, as Goldhaft later put it, “create a new society by
acting it out.”27
From its inception in January 1968, Yippie activism expanded the scope
of radical countercultural practice. Kurshan later praised Yippie activism’s
“creation of myths” to manipulate national media narratives. The Yip-­In,
a peaceful performance at Grand Central Station on March 22, 1968, was
a trial run for these ambitions. Police officers violently interrupted the
performance; the ensuing skirmish led to coverage in the New York Times
and Time magazine. Yippie activists were divided. In Do It! Rubin interprets
“scenes of police violence” as a revolutionary tactic. But Fouratt later criticized
Hoffman and Rubin’s plan to “manipulate young people” for exposure. Digger
activists shared Fouratt’s view: Coyote later recalled Berg accusing Hoffman
of “using people as ‘extras in a piece of police theater.’” These debates shaded
plans for the “Festival of Life,” the Yippies’ contribution to the protests against
President Johnson in Chicago. On March 31, the announcement that Johnson
would not run for re-­election deflated Yippie plans. In Revolution for the Hell
of It, Hoffman notes that Martin Luther King’s murder on April 4 was also
“a shock.” On April 14, 1968, the Yippies held the Yip-­Out in Central Park.
Planning for the municipally sanctioned event was half-­hearted. The Village
Voice characterized the Yip-­Out’s “flaccid” vibe as “obligatory”: “People kept
asking each other what was happening. And the answer, most of the time,
was ‘nothing.’”28
In June, after Robert Kennedy’s assassination all but assured that Vice-­
President Hubert Humphrey would take the Democratic nomination, Yippie

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20  Abraham

activists recommitted to bellicose radical countercultural practices that


included violent protest. Musing about Chicago in Revolution for the Hell of
It, Hoffman repudiates the “soon forgotten” Yip-­Out: “It was Grand Central
Station that stuck.” Hoffman rearticulates an advertising technique called
“blank space”—“cool images” in which viewers “can place” themselves—as
a revolutionary tactic involving interruption and “disruption”: “We do not
wish to project a calm secure future.” Hoffman rates January’s Tet Offensive
as “a work of art” in this regard. For Hoffman, bystanders were “not innocent”
in a revolutionary context: “What are the guidelines for revolution when the
house has been cast adrift in a tornado?” In Do It! Rubin asserts that a Yippie
activist was “a longhaired, bearded, hairy, crazy motherfucker whose life is
theater, every moment creating the new society as he destroys the old.” Rubin
also vilifies the chameleon-­like adaptability of liberalism, characterizing the
sudden clamor by liberal critics of the civil rights movement to extol the
virtues of nonviolence after King’s murder as a naked attempt “to control
black people.” As the Democratic National Convention drew closer and
the stakes of 1968 heightened, violence bled into the language of pleasure,
performance, and protest. In an editorial, Hoffman demanded “a huge orgasm
of destruction atop a giant media altar” to find “reality in the face of the
American political myth.”29
The emphasis that countercultural radicals placed on contradiction
manifested in their primary aesthetic: collage. In Revolution for the Hell of
It, Hoffman valorizes “living contradictions” who “ripped the Kodachrome
in two” to create “two pictures” or “two different rumors collided.” A 1968
review of Zappa’s music celebrates collage as “the only viable ‘modern’ art”:
“Our perspectives no longer are unilateral but kaleidoscopic.” Collage was so
omnipresent in radical countercultural practice that, in 1970’s Sisterhood Is
Powerful, Morgan rejects a “linear, tight, dry, boring, male super-­consistency”
and claims “uneven quality” as the province of women. Morgan’s desire to
identify collage with radical feminism underlines the way certain radicals
viewed the compositional technique as a fundamental component of radical
identity. Revolutionary potency was tied up in the ability to collage. Playful
notions of contradiction, metamorphosis, transcendence, and concatenation
are threaded throughout the radical counterculture’s manipulation of
traditional forms of theater, music, dance, fashion, and art, enhancing their
critique of the dominant order.30
This aesthetic permeated radical countercultural practice. In 1967, Zappa
argued, “We jam things that don’t belong together.” Albert later delineated
the same compositional approach: “Everything was all jumbled together but

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Fall/Winter 2018    Journal of Civil and Human Rights   21

it was altogether I think part of a whole.” Things perceived to be authentic


interrupted and disrupted things perceived to be artificial. Theater occurred
in the street, in public parks, and in fashionable clubs. Objects like the Free
Frame of Reference created contradictions: was it the stage or the world that
the stage was separated from that was real? Original music was resequenced
with atonal passages and interpolations of popular rock songs. Broadsides and
posters were stylized with cut-­up images and text. Digger activists published
collaborative broadsides and articles anonymously as if each one simply
documented the musings of some national id. Such kaleidoscopic techniques
went beyond rudimentary subversions of typical theatrical, musical,
visual, and textual structures: these eruptions and disruptions emulated
the expression and experience of pleasure, mimicked the dissolution and
recreation of society, and produced Hoffman’s revolutionary “blank space.”
Because middle-­class imperatives were not unilateral, only collage-­based
tactics could interrupt ubiquitous hegemonic patterns of plastic gratification.31
Countercultural radicals applied this aesthetic to their own bodies. Des
Barres’s memoir praises Paulekas as “the forerunner of thrift-­store fashion”:
“There were always plenty of falling-­apart velvet dresses and forties teddies
available.” Paulekas embellished vintage clothing with handmade pieces and
found objects, refitting and refashioning 1940s and 1950s garments that had
been worn by parents and grandparents into protest. Applying sequins and
feathers to outfits—collaging them—allowed freak bodies visually to subvert
middle-­class values, style, and etiquette. Cale-­Binion’s liner notes to Permanent
Damage declare that freak style was powerful: parents should watch their
“teenage daughters” because there might be a freak activist “lurking in your
neighborhood.” Des Barres later asserted that freak activists derived great
pleasure from sartorial collage: “I would have on an old vintage lace tablecloth
with ribbons woven through it, feathers in my hair, loads of makeup, sequins
stuck all over my face, and spike heels.” Countercultural radicals intentionally
made their bodies unintelligible by the standards of the dominant order. They
strove to become Goldhaft’s “certain amount of structure”: a brightly colored
piece that stood out in an otherwise monochrome collage.32
If we consider collage in relation to my critique of the radical counterculture’s
inchoate social constructionism, three interconnected conclusions can be
drawn. The first conclusion concerns age. Countercultural radicals believed
that the revolution was generational: parents and grandparents were the
enemy. In “Mom & Dad,” Zappa argues that parents could not “show a real
emotion.” In the GTOs song “T.V. Lives,” Frka’s lyrics proclaim, “My father’s
a knob and my mother’s a tube.” Countercultural radicals treated language

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22  Abraham

as a revolutionary wonderland of heteroglossia. Parents would never get


that Yippie activism was “nonsense”; as Rubin states in Do It! “Its basic
informational statement is a blank piece of paper.” New collaged forms of
music, fashion, and slang cemented relationships between countercultural
radicals and youthful countercultural publics. In Revolution for the Hell
of It, Hoffman explains that “blank space, the interrupted statement, the
unsolved puzzle, they are all involving.” For unhip observers, collage was
an impenetrable “unsolved puzzle”; for U.S. teenagers, Goldhaft’s “certain
amount of structure” was quite legible. At the same time, countercultural
radicals produced this frisson of belonging by participating in distinct forms
of ageism that were becoming hegemonic in this period.33
The second conclusion concerns class, race, disability, and gender. In
Revolution for the Hell of It, Hoffman proclaims, “We are cannibals, cowboys,
Indians, witches, warlocks. Weird-­looking freaks that crawl out of the cracks
in America’s nightmare.” Countercultural radicals treated identity politics
like the garments and found objects they used to collage their bodies
physically. They thoughtlessly and arbitrarily named, adorned, and combined
positive and pejorative stereotypes about working-­class persons, persons
of color, persons with disabilities, trans persons, nonbinary persons, and
intersex persons to describe middle-­class, white, nondisabled, cisgender,
and nonintersex bodies. There were also limits to who could transcend
which social categories unimpeded. Consider two examples of gender
nonconformity. In Do It! Rubin celebrates men sporting long hair as “the
beginning of our liberation from the sexual oppression that underlies this
whole military society.” In contrast, Teen’s freak exposé features a photograph
of freak activist Barbara Jackson, a Black woman with a shaved head “to be
different from other gals in long straight hair.” Other freak activists were
nonplussed: Jackson was apparently “carrying nonconformity too far, boys
declare.” Countercultural radicals were frequently and casually classist, racist,
ableist, cissexist, intersexist, and sexist; their grotesque sensibilities and their
standards of what was beautiful were paradoxically normalizing. Their use
of contradictions to fabricate a position in what political scientist Cathy
J. Cohen calls a “shared marginal relationship to dominant power which
normalizes, legitimizes, and privileges” was contradictory: it normalized,
legitimized, and privileged middle-­class white nondisabled cisgender
nonintersex activists.34
The third conclusion concerns gender and sexuality. “Where Is
PUBLIC at?” and “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” are typical
male-­authored radical countercultural metaphors: they depict male bodies
enacting revolution by penetrating—or collaging, in a not-­quite-­figurative

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sense—female bodies. Free City News, an October 1967 set of paper-­clipped


broadsides, concludes with another example. A faceless woman’s body,
naked except for a tag labelled “news” dangling from a strap-­on harness, is
overlaid onto a map of San Francisco. The image invites viewers to pull the
cord; it equates the conquest of urban, public space with sexual conquest;
and it suggests that pulling the cord will unleash sexual pleasure, collaged
performance, and revolutionary protest. In such metaphors, female bodies are
always implicitly or explicitly present—they are necessary—but they merely
relay, receive, or react to revolution. A 1967 Digger broadside celebrates an
activist who “flexes his strong loins of FREE.” Radical countercultural men
actively associated revolutionary power with virile cisgender male bodies
and rarely challenged sexism.35
Radical countercultural women did challenge sexism. Historian Tim
Hodgdon shows that women administrated and executed the day-­to-­day
labor that “sustained the Diggers’ public visibility.” Kandel later argued that
women were innately subversive: they challenged imperatives that women
“should speak about sex.” Freak, Digger, and Yippie women—some with
advanced degrees—contributed to key texts solely attributed to male partners;
for example, Do It!’s title page features the credit “zapped by Nancy Kurshan.”
But while radical countercultural women were instrumental in the creation
of a social environment where they had relative freedom, they did so with
male collaborators. When confronted with sexism from friends, sexual
partners, and coparents, only some rejected the dichotomous expectation,
in Morgan’s recollection, that women be “traditional nurturers” and “sexy
foxes.” Others took a more essentialist position: while they sidestepped the
narrow virility-­based arguments of male collaborators and celebrated the
revolutionary power of pleasure located in female bodies, they did so in a
rubric that valorized gender binarism and envisioned specific revolutionary
and postrevolution roles for women.36
These challenges were cisnormative and heteronormative. A 1968
characterization of “beautiful” Diggers divided “tough” men from “soft”
women who “fuck like angels” and “radiate children.” In 1968, Kandel affirmed
this binary: “Woman is always in relation to a man.” In 1966’s “God/Love
Poem,” Kandel writes:
your cock rises and throbs in my hands
a revelation / as Aphrodite knew it

there was a time when Gods were purer


/ I can recall nights among the honeysuckle
our juices sweeter than honey

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24  Abraham

Kandel’s essentialist saga of heterosexuality contrasts “purer” preindustrial


pleasure with the plastic gratification of industrial intervention. Free City
News reiterates this timeline with a history lesson that jumps from “The
Cave Man” to “The Roaring ‘20s.” Revolutionary power was rooted in the
ability of radicalized bodies to reassert a full spectrum of precapitalist
cross-­s ex pleasure. Kandel’s insinuation that capitalism had diluted
heterosexuality parallels Marcuse’s arguments in a 1966 preface to 1955’s Eros
and Civilization: “progress” required the reactivation of “arrested organic,
biological needs.” Kandel also anticipated Cleaver’s assertion in Soul on Ice
that “heterosexuality” extended from some antediluvian moment where a
“mitosis of the essence divided its Unitary Self in half.” If Aphrodite’s pleasure
could only come from a collision between Hoffman’s “two different rumors,”
ahistorical assumptions about primal heterosexuality and immutable
gender defined Goldhaft’s “certain amount of structure.” Countercultural
radicals promoted this narrow architecture for radical identity as trans
activists, radical feminists, bisexual activists, lesbian feminists, and gay
male activists mobilized against transphobia, male chauvinism, biphobia,
and homophobia.37
Freak, Digger, and Yippie activism all ebbed after key events. In Los
Angeles, on November 12, 1966, Zappa attended a protest at the Pandora’s Box
nightclub. The protest turned violent. The lyrics of “Plastic People,” recorded
days later, criticize “a vast quantity of plastic people” at Pandora’s Box. In
March 1967, Zappa moved to New York for six months. In San Francisco, in
1967, the concerns of Digger activists proved prescient: runaways swarmed
the Haight. During the Summer of Love, Free Food and other Free initiatives
were overrun. On October 6, Digger activists staged “Death of the Hippie.”
In Chicago, in August 1968, the Yippies joined the New Left and the BPP to
protest the Democratic National Convention. During televised skirmishes
between protesters and police officers, Hoffman and Rubin were arrested.
Afterward, Hoffman and Rubin were plagued by criticism that their primary
concern was their own legacy as revolutionaries. This criticism eventually
hardened into superficial shorthand for violent left-­wing extremism, fulfilling
Rubin’s appraisal of liberalism’s adaptability. Yippie activism is still invoked
by liberals to punch Left and conservatives to equivocate about violence on
the Right.38
Aspects of pleasure, performance, and protest were adopted and adapted
by political, social, and cultural movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
including Black Power, the Chicano Movement, Yellow Power, Red Power,
the disability rights movement, trans activism, radical feminism, bisexual

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Fall/Winter 2018    Journal of Civil and Human Rights   25

activism, lesbian feminism, gay liberation, and environmental activism. In


1968, Morgan declared, “We’re all bisexual anyway.” “The WITCH Manifesto”
of 1968 uses familiar language: “WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She
is the free part of each of us.” In 1969, Yellow Power activist Amy Uyematsu
criticized an “uneasiness in admitting and expressing natural human feelings.”
A resolution from the First National Chicana Conference in 1971 argues,
“‘A quitarnos todos nuestros complejos sexuales para tener una vida mejor
y feliz’ (Let’s cast off all our sexual complexes to have a better and happier
life).” Specific groups including Chicago’s Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians (1965); Ann Arbor’s White Panther Party (1968);
Minneapolis’s American Indian Movement (1968); New York’s Art Workers
Coalition (1969), Gay Activist Alliance (1969), Guerrilla Art Action Group
(1969), and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (1970); Chicago’s
Feminist Lesbian Intergalactic Party (1971); Dearborn’s Arab Community
Center for Economic and Social Services (1971); and Los Angeles’s Chicano
ASCO (1972) and Olivia Collective (1973) embraced, innovated, or paralleled
radical countercultural ideologies, practices, and aesthetics, extending their
legacy well past 1969.39
If we take countercultural radicals seriously, on their own terms and
from a variety of critical perspectives not generated by the New Left, we can
highlight their intensely political and productive contributions to radical
activism between 1965 and 1969. We can demonstrate that their articulations
of pleasure, performance, and protest were not the growls of a paper tiger;
rather, their ideologies, practices, and aesthetics fit in an intellectual trajectory
toward activist Audre Lorde’s 1978 outline of “the erotic as a considered source
of power.” We can contextualize the radical counterculture as an imprecise,
suggestive moment in what historian Emily K. Hobson calls “a shift from the
idealism of Marcuse to the anti-­idealism of Foucault.” Keeping important
critiques of their efforts in mind, we can underscore the ideological resolution
of grotesque and beautiful bodies that animated countercultural radicalism.
In Revolution for the Hell of It, Hoffman argues that “revolution lies” in “that
and endless other dichotomies.” In Ringolevio, Grogan concludes, “Nothing
moves a mountain but itself.” Free City News proclaims, “You are your own
alternative.” A 1967 Digger broadside celebrates an “animal” who “sees no
shadow.” Frka’s liner notes to Permanent Damage wonder, “What would
you look like without a reflection?” Countercultural radicals insisted that
they had an answer: the expression and experience of pleasure could erase
the reflection of middle-­class imperatives and resolve the contradiction of
modern U.S. life.40

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26  Abraham

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.

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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

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28  Abraham

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,”

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Fall/Winter 2018    Journal of Civil and Human Rights   29

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.”

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30  Abraham

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.

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