Alice Echols. Shaky Ground. The 60s and Its Aftershocks

SHAKY
GROUND
THE SIXTIES
AND ITS
AFTERSHOCKS
ALICE ECHOLS
shaky ground
Shaky Ground
The ’60 s
and Its Aftershocks
Alice Echols
columbia university press • new york

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2002 Alice Echols

All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Echols, Alice.
Shaky ground : the sixties and its aftershocks / Alice Echols.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–231–10670–X (cloth) — ISBN 0–231–10671–8 (paper)
1. United States — History —1961–1969 2. United States — Social conditions —
1960–1980. 3. United States — Politics and government — 1945–1989
4. Counterculture — United States — History — 20th century 5. Radicalism —
United States — History — 20th century. 6. Political culture — United States —
History — 20th century 7. Popular culture — United States — History —
20th century 8. Nineteen sixties 9. Nineteen seventies I. Title.
E839.4 .E28 2001

973.923 — dc21
2001042141
Columbia University Press books are printed

on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Lisa Hamm
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Pleasure has no passport, no identification papers.
—Michel Foucault
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
1
Part 1 Postwar America and the 1960s:

The Long, Strange Trip 15
1. Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury
17
2. The Ike Age: Rethinking the 1950s
51
3. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”:
Notes Toward a Remapping of the Sixties
61
4. “Nothing Distant About It”:
Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism
75
Part 2 Feminism, Sexual Freedom,

and Identity Politics 95
5. The Dworkinization of Catharine MacKinnon
97
6. “Totally Ready to Go”:
Shulamith Firestone and The Dialectic of Sex
103
viii Contents
7. The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968–1983

109
8. Queer Like Us?
129
9. “Thousands of Men and a Few Hundred Women”:
Janis Joplin, Sexual Ambiguity, and Bohemia
145
10. Gender Disobedience, Academia, and Popular Culture
151
Part 3 Turn the Beat Around 157

11. “Shaky Ground”: Popular Music in the Disco Years
159
12. White Faces, Black Masks
193
13. The Refuge of the Lions’ Den:
An Interview with John Paul Hammond
198
14. “Play That Funky Music”:
An Interview with Lenny Kravitz
201
15. “The Soul of a Martian”:
A Conversation with Joni Mitchell
207
Notes 223
Index 285
Acknowledgments
O
ver the many years that i
have worked on these essays,
I have had the good fortune of
having in my life many wonderful writers and artists. Artist Connie Samaras
was my partner and co-conspirator during much of this period. Although our
fields were very different, we were grappling with many of the same questions
about community, identity, and desire, and she influenced my thinking in
ways large and small. It’s hard to remember who thought up what, but I do
know it was Connie who coined the expression “theory damaged.” Her knowl-
edge and enthusiasm about culture—high and low—were an important catalyst
for my move into cultural criticism.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I knew I wanted to stay put and that I
wanted to orient myself towards writing. Living in L.A., one of the few big
cities that remains affordable for artists and writers, has helped make this
possible. So have my wonderful friends and colleagues Lois Banner, Ellen
DuBois, Tania Modleski, Marla Stone, Devra Weber, Alice Wexler, and
sometime Angeleno Wini Breines. Our dinners and hikes together are often
ecstasies of discussion. Tania, Ellen, Wini, and Alice also have read more
versions of more articles than I’m sure they care to remember. Their influ-
ence is all over these essays. Wini, in particular, read and commented on the
entire manuscript, and gave me many useful suggestions for revisions.
I also want to thank Ruth Bradley, Charlotte Nekola, Paula Rabinowitz,
Sandy Silberstein, Bette Skandalis, and Pat Yeghessian, the maverick
Women’s Studies crew at the University of Michigan. Searching critics, loyal
friends, and (with the exception of Bette and Pat) reluctant disco dancers,
they made those years as close to fun as graduate school can be. Particular
thanks is owed Paula, who read this manuscript in its entirety and offered
x Acknowledgments
trenchant criticisms that proved invaluable. Throughout, my musician

friend Bob Currie has not only been a source of terrific music trivia and a
knowledgeable critic, he’s also been a great support. Thanks as well to Peg
Lourie, Laura Downs, and Nora Faires who know hooey—no matter how
dressed up—when they see it.
It was historian Lois Banner who in 1995 suggested I put together a col-
lection of my essays. Ann Miller of Columbia University Press got behind
the idea, and she has helped shape the book, pestered me to keep at it, and
supported me throughout the long process. Series editor, historian Robin
Kelley, has been enthusiastic throughout. Thanks as well to editor Peter Di-
mock, his assistant, Anne Routon, and managing editor Anne McCoy. Bob
Hemenway not only caught lots of embarrassing errors and inconsistencies
in his final edit, he was also an engaged reader.
I would also like to thank the many fine editors with whom I’ve worked,
especially Sara Bershtel and Riva Hocherman at Metropolitan Books, Scott
Malcomson and Stacey D’Erasmo at the Village Voice Literary Supplement, Sue
Cummings at the L.A. Weekly, and Elsa Dixler at The Nation. Thanks as well
to Carole Vance, David Farber, and the staff at Socialist Review. As always my
agent, Geri Thoma, has been invaluable.
This book couldn’t have been written without the cooperation of those
who graciously agreed to be interviewed. I would like to thank everyone who
shared with me their memories of the Haight and sixties rock, especially
Bob Seidemann, Peggy Caserta, Linda Gravenites, Bob Brown, Jim Haynie,
Carl Gottlieb, Milan Melvin, and Joshua White. I would also like to thank
John Paul Hammond and Joni Mitchell for agreeing to interviews.
Finally I want to thank Gilda Zwerman for the crucial role she played in
this project. A discerning critic, she always let me know when I hadn’t yet
nailed it. Our talks about the social-change movements of the sixties made
me reconsider some of my earlier work. Most of all, her faith in me, love for
me, and her full-tilt enthusiasm for life are why I finished this book.
shaky ground
Introduction
“
E
at shit! ten million flies can’t
Be Wrong!” It was the summer of
1969, the year of Woodstock, the
Manson murders, and the unraveling of America’s leading New Left group,
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I was eighteen and part of a Quak-
er-sponsored project to fight racism in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
The Quakers planned and funded our project, chose five teenagers to take
part in it, and then, in the self-flagellating style so characteristic of sixties
liberals, they handed it over to someone who had nothing but contempt for
them and their “squishy politics.” Our director was a dour woman with ties
to Weatherman, the most outrageously off-the-wall of all the splinter
groups to emerge from the meltdown of SDS. Weatherman saw up-against-
the-wall revolutionary potential in white working-class kids, so we spent
those first weeks dutifully cruising burger stands looking for recruits. Un-
able to lure them to our coffeehouse where we showed grainy agit-prop
films like In the Year of the Pig, we took to hanging out at Washington’s SDS
house, which is where I saw the puzzling graffiti, scrawled on the upstairs
hallway wall. I never knew if it was meant as a gross-out or a fake-out, or if
it was a send-up of the stupid slogans that passed for analysis in Weather-
man. But, then, I was too young to have any idea how this moment fit into
the history of the New Left. As a result, almost everything that summer was
a bewildering blur, like the time a leading Weatherman, all macho bluster,
blew through town and told us it was time to “pick up the gun” in support of
the Black Panthers and the North Vietnamese. Anything less was wimpy. By
summer’s end I had the rhetoric down, but I knew next to nothing about
combating racism in suburbia.
2 Introduction
I was intrigued by the Movement, even its debased Weatherman version,

but I was also relieved to be heading off to a college halfway across the coun-
try in rural Minnesota. Carleton offered nothing like the bizarre world of
radical politics I had brushed up against in D.C. The closest I came to civil
disobedience in those years was poli sci professor Paul Wellstone’s course
on it. After graduation in 1973, I moved with a group of friends to Santa Fe,
New Mexico. I had read Sisterhood Is Powerful, The Female Eunuch and Sexual
Politics, but the feminist movement seemed tantalizingly out of reach, a big-
city phenomenon. As it turned out, the no-holds-barred, cutting-edge
feminism I was searching for was an hour away in Albuquerque at the Uni-
versity of New Mexico’s fledgling women’s studies program. Women’s stud-
ies had a beleaguered part-time director, but it was run by a collective that
was dominated by a quarrelsome group of lesbian-feminists and socialist-
feminists. Those first couple of years, the women’s studies program had a
deliciously rogue feel to it. The bulk of our courses were taught by graduate
students, undergrads, and “community” people like myself who had no
connection to the university and whose only qualification was that some-
where along the line they had acquired a B.A. Regular faculty must have
taught some of our classes, but the entire university had only a handful of
full-time female professors, and, as I recall, they kept their distance from
us. Several months after I began attending meetings, I moved to Albu-
querque and started working at the university as a groundskeeper, one of
several women hired to the all-male grounds crew as a result of affirmative
action. Women’s studies was located at the women’s center, whose grounds
were near my bailiwick. I took my breaks at the center where I devoured new
and back issues of off our backs, Plexus, and Big Mama Rag, the leading femi-
nist newspapers, which were filled with stories of internecine movement
battles that I’d analyze ten years later as a graduate student.
I fell in love with those women’s studies meetings, which were all poli-
tics, process, and dish. The veteran politicos who ran the show were a mes-
merizing bunch—smart, incorrigible, and apparently fearless. They reveled
in their ability to out-argue others, and to make the telling political point. I
was especially struck by the lesbians, who in so many ways didn’t match the
cultural stereotype. They weren’t the losers of legend. They’d had
boyfriends, been married, and were often quite pretty, which for me was a
revelation. Being around so many plus-size egos was a wonderful corrective
Introduction 3
to college where all but one of my professors had been male. However, col-
lective meetings sometimes felt a bit like feminist boot camp. Warm and
cozy they weren’t. Almost anyone could be cut off, corrected, silenced.
Meetings sometimes devolved into parodies of political correctness, most
memorably when one woman got up in the middle of a heated discussion to
demonstrate how a feminist should walk. She stomped, of course.
My walk passed muster, but in other respects I was found wanting. The
ruling clique believed that the collective, which was overwhelmingly white
and middle class, should become more working class, more “Third World,”
and perhaps more lesbian. However, when I first joined the group I was still
living in arty Santa Fe, not blue-collar Albuquerque, I had long, hippie-
length, blondish hair, and despite considerable effort came across as some-
one who had attended prep school and a private college. Back then, lesbian-
ism compensated somewhat for class and racial privilege, but I couldn’t play
that card since I was reluctant at first to declare myself anything. Self-defi-
nition didn’t always count for very much in those days, anyway. I was quick-
ly tagged bisexual, mostly on the basis of my hair, the telltale sign of my lin-
gering investment in “the patriarchy.” This was not a good thing. In those
years bisexuality carried the same suggestion of unreliability that liberal did
in far left circles.
In women’s studies the boundary between good and bad feminism was
so rigidly drawn and so vigilantly patrolled that it didn’t take brains galore
to figure out how to gain acceptance in the group. Over time I learned to be
as arrogant and dogmatic as the next person. However, in the end, I could
never quite get with the program. I listened to the Rolling Stones and Barry
White rather than Holly Near, I socialized with too many heterosexual fem-
inists, and I refused to get the obligatory crewcut. This wasn’t all deliberate
resistance on my part, mind you, but there was an element of provocation,
or at least a bit of a tweak. For better or for worse, my relationship to femi-
nism has been like this ever since.
Taken together, my two movement experiences amounted to less than
three years of my life. Yet these were extraordinarily intense years. Although I
had no intention of studying the sixties when I entered graduate school in
1976—in fact, in history one couldn’t yet study the decade—much of my sub-
sequent work would grow out of my effort to make sense of this period. For
eleven years I was a student in the University of Michigan’s doctoral program
4 Introduction
in history. My intellectual home, however, was women’s studies. Michigan’s

program prided itself on its rigorousness and theoretical sophistication. No
vulgar Marxism or lesbian-separatism here. And at Michigan some women
faculty members, including established scholars like Louise Tilly and Eliza-
beth Douvan, got involved early on. Feminist scholarship in those years was so
dynamic—all dazzling breakthroughs and paradigm shifts—that many of the
university’s brightest graduate students gravitated toward women’s studies.
Michigan’s program was also unusual in that it encouraged maverick think-
ing, even when it meant taking on other feminists.
As it turned out, there were plenty of opportunities to do just that in the
years ahead. At the very moment that poststructuralists and social histori-
ans were taking apart the category of gender and revealing the ways that sex-
uality was socially and historically constructed, some feminists were begin-
ning to embrace the idea of feminine difference and putting forward
essentialist or precultural explanations of gender and sexuality. Poststruc-
turalism hadn’t yet acquired the cachet it would have in the mid-to-late
eighties, but the new social history exerted quite an influence, especially at
Michigan. Social historians emphasized the importance of granting agency
to the oppressed and this ran counter to the tendency of some feminists to
see women exclusively as victims of patriarchy. These tensions were bound
to come to a head, and they did quite dramatically as the feminist an-
tipornography movement took shape. Although the line between activists
and scholars was not neatly drawn, the debate about pornography neverthe-
less revealed a growing rift between academics and activists.
Beginning in the mid-seventies, feminist activists started targeting
pornography on the grounds that it promoted violence against women.
Within just a few years pornography had supplanted all other issues in the
feminist movement. Quite a few of us in Michigan women’s studies were
dismayed by this campaign, especially its targeting of pornography as the
linchpin of women’s oppression and its dichotomized view of male and fe-
male sexuality. The idea that women seek only reciprocity and intimacy in
lovemaking and that men are obsessed with power and domination, as these
activists often alleged, not only flew in the face of my own experience, but
was a depressing reaffirmation of conventional ideas about men’s and
women’s sexuality. What bothered me most was the ease with which the an-
tiporn crusade defined cuddly sex as feminist and stigmatized as male-
Introduction 5
identified just about everything else. I couldn’t see that the feminist im-
pulse to hold desire accountable to political principle had improved any-
one’s life, and the movement’s ever-narrowing notion of acceptable sex
seemed likely to lead to greater repression. I worried that feminism, which
had expanded women’s sense of sexual possibility (and had facilitated my
own coming out), might now be feeding those familiar feelings of sexual
shame with which many women, myself included, struggled. After all,
whose sexuality could be easily squared with the nice-girl sexuality of the
antiporn movement? In the end, I was fairly certain that pornography would
survive this new crusade against it, but I wasn’t so sure we would.
It’s been twenty years since I wrote the polemic that eventually became
“The Taming of the Id,” an essay that criticized the feminist antipornogra-
phy movement. I had written it as a seminar paper, but it reached a much
wider audience. Friend and fellow grad student Gayle Rubin suggested I
submit it for inclusion in Powers of Desire, an anthology about feminism and
sexuality that Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson were
editing. Ann and Sharon were involved in planning Barnard College’s 1982
Scholar and Feminist Conference on sexuality, and when Village Voice
columnist Ellen Willis decided against giving a keynote talk, I was asked in
her stead. I was thrilled to be part of this effort to open up for debate the
gnarly question of feminism’s relationship to sexual desire. The day of the
conference, however, all my bad-girl bravado failed me. I felt only stom-
ach-churning terror as I realized that some of the very feminists I took to
task in my talk were bound to be in the audience. Moreover, getting into the
auditorium required walking past a vocal group of antiporn protesters.
Wearing T-shirts that read “For a Feminist Sexuality” on the front and
“Against S/M” on the back, they passed out a leaflet that attacked several
women associated with the conference for either having kinky sexual tastes
or for supporting those who did. The idea that the conference was a brief for
s/m proved a very effective smear. Some people still refer to it as the s/m
conference, though Carole Vance and the planning committee carefully
framed the conference as an exploration of “the ambiguous and complex re-
lationship between sexual pleasure and danger in women’s lives and in
feminist theory.”
Today most academic feminists view the feminist antipornography
movement with smug contempt. Bashing leading antiporn feminists Andrea
6 Introduction
Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon is so routine it’s old hat. But criticizing
the movement in 1982 was nothing short of heretical in some circles. No one
associated with the conference was prepared for the fallout. Barnard College
confiscated 1,500 copies of the conference diary, a booklet that included
planning committee notes, workshop abstracts, and not-very-racy graphics.
More important, Barnard’s Scholar and Feminist Conference—an annual
event—lost its funding as a result of the controversy. Much of the feminist
press was critical both of the conference and Powers of Desire, which was pub-
lished a year later. I didn’t live in New York where the sex debates were es-
pecially rancorous, but all the bad notices found their way soon enough to
Michigan. My essay, a version of which appears in this volume, had a take-
no-prisoners quality to it, which guaranteed that it would be judged harsh-
ly. Not long after the conference, I broke out in shingles, highly unusual for
someone my age. It was about this time that it dawned on me that I’d become
notorious in the small world of academic feminism.
Barnard had professional costs for me, but in the long run the confer-
ence was spectacularly successful. Our contention that feminism should
acknowledge that sexuality is a domain of pleasure as well as danger, which
seemed almost scandalous twenty years ago, is now a commonplace, at
least among many feminists in the academy. We were, I now joke, prema-
turely anticensorship. But if the anticensorship forces won the battle
within academia, the antiporn movement affected the way feminism was
viewed by the public at large. As I argue in “The Dworkinization of
Catharine MacKinnon,” antiporn feminists, with the help of the media,
succeeded in making their views understood as the feminist position on
pornography. When the mainstream media featured the porn wars, they
chose civil libertarians or women from outside feminism—often the reck-
lessly quotable Camille Paglia—to oppose Dworkin and MacKinnon, et al.
The invisibility of anticensorship feminists reinforced the caricature of
feminists as dreary, finger-wagging moralists.
Of course, feminists have long been ridiculed as humorless and up-
tight. None more than the radical feminists of the late sixties and early sev-
enties. Researching “Taming” made me realize that radical feminism was
among the most poorly understood parts of the sixties. In fact, most histo-
ries of the period marginalized, belittled, or attacked the women’s move-
ment, no matter what the tendency or strand of feminism under discus-
Introduction 7
sion. Moreover, most accounts of the sixties, whether written by new left-
ists or feminists, failed to address the centrality of left-wing thinking to
radical feminism. So in 1983 I set out to write a dissertation that analyzed
the origins and trajectory of radical feminism through both oral histories
and more traditional archival sources. Daring to Be Bad, a revised version of
my dissertation, was published in 1989, and quickly became a hotly debat-
ed book. I’ve included in this collection two essays—“We Gotta Get Out of
This Place” and “Nothing Distant About It”—that draw on and elaborate my
work in this book.
What I set out to do in Daring was to reveal the vision, vitality, and some-
times sheer wackiness of radical feminism, but without ever losing sight of
its complicated indebtedness to other sixties movements. Daring was also
intended to be quite a bit more than an effort to write feminism into the six-
ties. I wanted to distinguish radical feminism from cultural feminism, a
strand that grew out of radical feminism but contravened much that was
fundamental to it. Cultural feminism positioned itself in opposition to the
left, traded on conventional ideas about femininity, and viewed feminism
as a countercultural activity rather than as a political enterprise. It also
brought about feminism’s reconciliation with the market, religion, and,
most important, the state—the very components of “the system” which the
movement had once opposed.
At the time I was working on the book, radical feminism was so misun-
derstood, so frequently conflated with what it had turned into, that I felt I
had to separate these two strands linguistically. I now think that calling it all
radical feminism would have raised fewer hackles. And since I stressed the
ways that weaknesses and contradictions within radical feminism helped
give rise to cultural feminism, using radical feminism as an umbrella term
would have been consistent with my thesis. Daring was the first history of
second-wave feminism, and some readers, especially movement veterans,
wanted a history that accorded a smaller, more discreet role to conflict. But
the women’s movement, and the radical feminist wing in particular, crack-
led with contentiousness and conflict, sometimes destructively so. Howev-
er, to me, one of the most compelling aspects of radical feminism was the
encouragement it gave women to engage in unladylike disagreement, to
dare to be bad. Although I don’t regret the book’s focus on conflict, I do
think that in my effort to chronicle the movement’s every ideological twist
8 Introduction
and turn and the inevitable battles around them, I gave short shrift to the
ways—large, small, and contradictory—that radical feminism transformed
American culture and society.
One might imagine that my next major undertaking, Scars of Sweet Par-
adise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, emerged seamlessly from Daring.
After all, wasn’t Janis Joplin the original bad girl, the woman whose refusal
to sound pretty or to behave like a lady anticipated feminism’s demolition
of good-girl femininity? Although in many ways she was, that’s not how I
happened to write a book about her. Both my notoriety and the stodginess of
my discipline, which usually dismisses as “journalistic” attempts to write
about recent history, kept me on the margins of academia. By 1992 I was
weary of one-year teaching gigs. I began freelancing and I decided to write
a history of rock music that would foreground race, sexuality, and gender in
a way that would appeal to a general audience. In the course of reading piles
of rock biographies I ran across two about Janis Joplin, which were particu-
larly annoying examples of what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed pathography,
the kind of biography writing that focuses obsessively on dysfunction and
disaster. I was complaining about this to fellow historian Robin Kelley when
he suggested I write a book about Joplin. Biography was not a genre that es-
pecially interested me, and there were already several books out about the
singer. However, I had to admit that much about her life—her move from
folk to rock (and from North Beach to Haight-Ashbury), her love of black
music and culture, her mutable sexuality, and the difficulties she faced as a
breakthrough woman in rock—lent itself to my project.
At first, Joplin’s story interested me primarily for what it could tell me
about the sixties and rock music. But Joplin was too complex, contradicto-
ry, and outsized a figure to be reduced to a mere vehicle for my cultural his-
tory. As I listened to her music and spoke with her friends and fellow mu-
sicians I grew more curious about her, especially the elaborate
masquerades that this icon of authenticity, this proselytizer of “being your-
self,” staged in order to disguise her heroin habit and unconventional sex-
ual desires. However, I never abandoned my aim to embed Joplin in the
history of the sixties; in fact, I came to see this as critical to my effort to de-
pathologize her. If readers could see that her recklessness and defiance
were not hers alone, but were in many ways generational, I felt I could move
them past the familiar portrait of Joplin as a spectacularly screwed-up hip-
Introduction 9
pie chick, the poster child of sixties dysfunctionality. Of course, in certain

respects Joplin was unique; certainly her openness to same-sex sexual re-
lationships was not typical of most hippies. Very early on in my research I
became interested in understanding the ways in which bohemian sexuality
changed when Haight-Ashbury superseded North Beach and bohemia be-
came a mass phenomenon, and how this shift affected Joplin. I explore this
in “ ‘Thousands of Men and a Few Hundred Women’: Janis Joplin, Sexual
Ambiguity, and Bohemia.”
Scars of Sweet Paradise also reflected my effort to more fully integrate the
counterculture into the history of the sixties. Although more kids passed
through the counterculture than SDS, historians, myself included, have fo-
cused on the political movements with which they themselves were often
involved. Scars is, among other things, a meditation on what political ac-
tivists and hippies shared: a commitment to high-risk living, what Joplin
called living “superhypermost.” The book also challenges the conventional
view that the counterculture was all goofy optimism and that the world of
sex, drugs, and rock and roll was one big happy bash—an especially durable
myth among baby boomers.
Just as Daring to Be Bad is an unflinching look back at the women’s
movement, so is Scars of Sweet Paradise an unsentimental portrait of the six-
ties counterculture. As I researched the book, I came to believe that the
problem with the counterculture wasn’t that it went too far—the typical
view—but rather that its libertinism and its elevation of the far-out masked
the ways that the hippie subculture mirrored the values of the dominant
culture, especially in regard to women and gays. Crucial to Joplin’s story was
the transformation of sixties rock from the bastard child of the entertain-
ment industry to its crown jewel. I wanted to push past the usual tale of co-
optation whereby idealistic sixties rockers set out to change the world only
to find themselves corrupted and transformed by it instead. My own view,
which I flesh out in “Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury,” reflects
my dissatisfaction with both the gloomy, functionalist understanding of
youth culture as a mere invention of hip capitalism and those rhapsodic
readings of popular culture as a site of resistance and subversion that are so
characteristic of cultural studies today.
At the same time that I am skeptical of work intent on finding the utopi-
an longings and counterhegemonic possibilities in popular culture, my own
10 Introduction
relationship to rock ’n’ roll was profound, even politicizing. When I turned
five in 1956 I began listening to rock ’n’ roll. I went to sleep at night with a
little cream-colored transistor radio beside my pillow quietly playing the
same Top 40 songs I watched teenagers dance to on American Bandstand.
Music was no sideshow in my life. I holed up for hours in the basement lis-
tening to rock ’n’ roll records. Growing up right outside a black majority city
no doubt affected my listening habits. Before long, I graduated from Top 40
to soul-music radio. In my experience, the music and the politics were con-
nected. The Supremes and the Temptations didn’t sing “political” songs,
but listening to them on WOL, one of D.C.’s two soul stations, made me cu-
rious about black culture and politics. I’m not sure I would have been so
eager to read books like Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s bestseller Soul on
Ice had I not been hooked on soul music. Like so many other white middle-
class kids in the sixties who were captivated by “blackness,” I invested
African Americans with greater authenticity and soulfulness, and an out-
sider’s view of the world. Whites’ fascination with blackness—or this partic-
ular construction of blackness—is a recurrent theme in postwar America,
playing a critical (and sometimes troubling) role in rock ’n’ roll and white
radical activism of the sixties, and I discuss this in “We Gotta Get Out of This
Place,” “White Faces, Black Masks,” and more glancingly in profiles of mu-
sicians Lenny Kravitz and John Paul Hammond.
The notion that blacks are soulful, authentic, and at odds with the dom-
inant culture was widely held in the sixties and was behind hip white kids’
love affair with soul music and the black movement. The celebration of soul
had roots in the ideology of black power, which promoted this kind of racial
typing, but it also echoed the earlier white hipster vision of blacks and was
problematic in just the ways that the Jack Kerouac/Norman Mailer view of
blacks had been. For African Americans, acceptance was contingent upon
matching the racial profile. This only became clear to me ten years later,
during the disco years of the mid-to-late seventies, when many whites who
had been R&B aficionados turned their backs on popular, contemporary
music by black artists. In contrast to the sixties and the nineties when there
was intense white interest in the music and culture of African Americans,
the disco seventies were years when “blackness” held little or no cachet.
Whites’ loss of interest, or worse, their hostility to “black” music, made me
curious about the process of racial fascination. No doubt, one reason I was
Introduction 11
attuned to this cultural shift was that starting in 1980 I began working part-
time as a disco-funk deejay and saw the racial antagonism up front.
Disco and the backlash against it are among the most curious and para-
doxical phenomena of recent cultural history. Although disco developed out
of R&B and its leading performers were black, many people thought it was
“white” music. The new dance music arose in gay clubs and gays remained a
critical audience, but many Americans were clueless about its links to that
community. Finally, disco was at once hugely popular and intensely loathed.
Indeed, before the emergence of the angry white male, there were the disco
wars of the seventies. The backlash against disco had a lot to do with dein-
dustrialization, affirmative action, and the rise of feminism and gay libera-
tion—all of which triggered fears of displacement among white heterosexu-
al males. But discophobia also grew out of the growing divergence of R&B
and white rock music in the late sixties. As I discuss in “ ‘Shaky Ground’:
Popular Music in the Disco Years,” rock and R&B were on a collision course
that culminated in the battle over disco.
If African Americans have found themselves on shaky ground in relation
to rock ’n’ roll—music that it can be argued they invented but has come to be
seen as “white”—so have women. All the nineties’ hoopla about “Women in
Rock,”—the MTV programs and special issues of Rolling Stone—only under-
scores women’s precarious position in the male-dominated world of rock ’n’
roll. From the beginning, women were at a disadvantage because rock devel-
oped at a time when women were expected to be sexy, not sexual. Fifties
girls—black or white—could never have achieved stardom by staking out the
same sexually transgressive territory that Elvis Presley had so effortlessly
claimed. Etta James and Tina Turner tried, but, then, for years their popular-
ity did not extend much beyond the black community. By the early sixties, girl
groups like the Chantals and the Shirelles established a beachhead for women
in rock ’n’ roll, but with the exception of Diana Ross, the singers in these
groups remained nameless and faceless, despite the millions of records they
sold. Rock ’n’ roll was such a boy’s game that Wanda Jackson was marketed as
the female Gene Vincent and Janis Martin was dubbed the female Elvis. It
wasn’t until the late sixties when Janis Joplin helped close what one critic
called rock’s “girl gap” that the situation shifted. Joplin’s influence was sig-
nificant, but she couldn’t single-handedly remake the world of rock music.
To this day, rock ’n’ roll retains a strong masculinist bias. I grapple with
12 Introduction
women’s vexed relationship to rock in a long profile of singer-songwriter

Joni Mitchell.
although this book grows out of my ongoing struggle to make sense of the
sixties—SDS graffiti and all—it is not narrowly focused on that one decade.
Rather it takes as its subject the shaky ground of the post-World War II pe-
riod through the 1990s—the rumblings of change in the post-war years, the
tectonic shifts of the sixties, and the aftershocks that have reverberated ever
since. Viewed in this fashion we can see how the conflicts and confusion
about race, sexuality, gender and generation have played out over time. I
also believe that the sixties is best illuminated when embedded in a discus-
sion of the past fifty-plus years. As I argue in “The Ike Age: Rethinking the
1950s,” the fifties helped give rise to the sixties in all kinds of ways. Postwar
affluence underwrote the dropout protest culture of sixties youth. Postwar
parents’ obsession with material comfort and security provoked restless-
ness and risk-taking in their children. The hyper-domestic fifties pro-
voked a gendered generational revolt among young, middle-class white
kids. Even the cold war rhetoric of American democracy and freedom en-
couraged a critical consciousness about America’s support of dictatorships
abroad and support of racial apartheid at home. But if the postwar years
spurred change, they also cast a long shadow on the culture and movements
of the sixties. Sexism and homophobia, for example, were woven into the
fabric of these movements. Even sixties rock culture, which certainly fa-
vored racial equality, developed an understanding, an ideology even, about
the music and blacks’ relationship to it, that guaranteed that rock would
come to be seen as “white.” And though many factors contributed to the
emergence of antiporn feminism, part of its appeal was that it echoed older,
powerful ideas about sexuality as male and love as female.
Shaky Ground tackles a wide variety of topics—from the counterculture
and feminism to disco and the racial politics of culture. It represents my ef-
fort to map an alternative history of the postwar years and beyond, one that
challenges the usual constructions of that era, especially the idea that the
sixties represented a total rupture, a golden moment when the ideas and
values of the dominant culture were banished, and that the seventies
marked the end of meaningful social and political change. These essays also
reflect my ongoing struggle with identity politics. Many of the artists and
Introduction 13
thinkers whose work I explore in these pages, among them Joni Mitchell,
Sly Stone, and Shulamith Firestone, have struggled to blast through the
confines of gender, race, genre—the very categories reified by identity pol-
itics. While I understand the strategic value of this sort of politics, I long for
a politics that doesn’t confuse who we are with what we can become, one that
can go beyond moralizing and political purity. I offer these essays in the
hope that they might help us move a little closer to that goal.
Part 1
Postwar America and the 1960s:
The Long, Strange Trip
The essays in the following section are focused on the social and cul-
tural movements of the 1960s. Both “Nothing Distant About It” and
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” were written shortly after the publi-
cation of Daring to Be Bad, and reflect my dissatisfaction with the ways
in which most histories of the ’60s, with their determined focus on
the New Left, marginalize other movements, particularly women’s
liberation. “Nothing Distant About It,” which was written in 1991 and
published in David Farber’s 1994 collection of essays on the sixties,
argues that women’s liberation was above all else a sixties movement,
even if its greatest impact occurred in the 1970s. “We Gotta Get Out of
This Place,” which grew out of a 1990 talk and first appeared in a 1992
issue of Socialist Review, not only critiques the historiography of the
sixties, but also offers some thoughts on how we might remap the field
so that sixties historians begin to capture a larger slice of those times.
Working all those years on the 1960s made me more curious about
the 1950s. And in 1994, as I was preparing to teach a course on the
1950s, I read a number of recently published books about the period,
including some very bold revisionist efforts. I discuss these books and
my ambivalent reaction to them in “The Ike Age: Rethinking the
1950s,” a 1994 Village Voice article that I have lightly reworked for in-
clusion in this collection. Finally, as I researched my biography of
Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise, I was struck by the absence of good
histories of the counterculture. As a result, much of my time inter-
viewing people was spent asking them for their thoughts about and
recollections of the counterculture and the new rock music that was so
much a part of it. Some of that material was too far flung, too distant
16 postwar america and the 1960s
from Joplin’s story to be included in Scars—so I decided to fashion a

freestanding essay on the counterculture that would make use of it.
“Hope and Hype in 1960s Haight-Ashbury” is largely taken from “The
Beautiful People” chapter of the Joplin biography, but this essay con-
tains new material and is differently framed.
1
Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury
O
ne of the biggest news stories
of the sixties was the hippie
counterculture. San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury was the counterculture’s epicenter and during the summer
of 1967 its streets were jammed with middle Americans in cars and on tour
buses gaping at long-haired kids, who found themselves competing for
sidewalk space with dozens of journalists and TV news crews covering this
latest outbreak of rebellion. Hippies remained in the headlines through the
early 1970s, yet most histories of the period make only passing mention of
the counterculture. When not scornful or mocking, most accounts are clue-
less, rarely much better than what appeared at the time in glossy magazines
like Time, which came up with such gems as hippies “scorn money—they call
it ‘bread.”’1 If the counterculture appears as a sideshow in most sixties
books, it’s in large measure because most scholars are interested in the po-
litical movements of the day—movements with which they often identified
and in which they were sometimes active. Radical activists also left a paper
trail of position papers, meeting notes, and newspapers to study, whereas
the radicals of the counterculture left little trace of themselves. Most of what
exists in the way of a written record was produced by outsiders, and though
some of it is brilliant, particularly Tom Wolfe’s amped story of Ken Kesey
and the Acid Tests and Joan Didion’s steely-eyed, no-bullshit account of
1967’s Summer of Love, it was not generated from within the ranks.2
This essay was previously published in somewhat different form in Scars of

Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 1999).
There’s another reason sixties scholars give the counterculture short shrift.
Bluntly put, hippies aren’t hip. In contrast to the Beats, who only acquire
more cool and more relevance, hippies (the Grateful Dead excepted) seem
sillier and more anachronistic with each passing year.
Make no mistake: the counterculture could be silly. But, then, so could
the political movements of that era. And whatever one might think of the
hippie phenomenon, it wasn’t insignificant. More people passed through
“love ghettos” like Haight-Ashbury than took part in Students for a Demo-
cratic Society, the leading New Left group of the 1960s. But, of course, the
counterculture had musicians as drawing cards. Rock music was key to the
Haight’s popularity, what made this new bohemia go mass. However, San
Francisco’s rock scene would not have come together as it did were it not for
the city’s bohemian subculture, which was the incubator for the eclectic,
acid-inspired rock of groups like the Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, and
was the audience at the early rock dances. Even Time magazine understood
that “the sound was also the scene.”3 Although the counterculture and the
rock bands fed each other for a time, their relationship shifted in the wake
of 1967’s Monterey Pop, the festival which put the San Francisco bands on
the map and transformed the world of rock ’n’ roll.
What follows is a revisionist account of San Francisco’s counterculture
and the rock bands that were a part of it.4 This is not the usual gloomy nar-
rative of rock’s co-optation by the music business, nor does it confirm the
by now familiar portrait of the counterculture, particularly the notion that
its reigning sensibility was goofy optimism, that it shared very little with the
political movements of the day, and that its undoing lay mostly in its leg-
endary excessiveness. Along the way, I explore the counterculture’s begin-
nings in beatnik North Beach and the factors that came together to create
Haight-Ashbury. This is a story of hope and hype, not lost innocence.5
Everyone knows about the peace, love, grass, and groovy music, but the
counterculture was always more complicated—edgier, darker, and more tied
to the dominant culture—than most anyone at the time could see.
speaking at the 1960 republican national convention, FBI chief J.

Edgar Hoover declared “communists, beatniks and eggheads” the most
dangerous groups in America.6 It was an odd, even paranoid, assessment.
The CP was shattered, the Beat “rebellion” had fizzled out, and few intellec-
Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury 19
tuals and even fewer college students were challenging the kneejerk anti-
communism of the day. College campuses were such “monoliths of con-
formity” at the decade’s start that University of California Chancellor Clark
Kerr confidently predicted that “employers will love this generation” be-
cause “they are going to be easy to handle.”7 Hoover’s rant was paranoid, but
in a way it was also weirdly prescient for over the next few years San Fran-
cisco started filling up with young people looking for the Beats they’d read
about and gazed longingly at in mass circulation magazines in the late
fifties.8 Most of the reporting on the Beats was calculated to scare people off,
but it alerted all those kids who felt like mutants growing up in fifties Amer-
ica to an alternative existence, a way out of the awful gray dullness looming
before them. Indeed, Haight-Ashbury would never have happened as it did,
and maybe not at all, without that earlier, and beleaguered, outpost of bo-
hemia—beatnik North Beach.
The pioneers of Haight-Ashbury came to San Francisco looking for the
Beats, but most of their idols had fled North Beach by 1960. The coffee-
houses, bars, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore hung on,
but North Beach was seedy, and had a tourist-trap feel to it. Then in 1965,
just as it was becoming clear that acoustic folk music had run its course and
the Beat scene was completely played out, San Francisco’s bohemian world
began to transmogrify in ways no one could have predicted. A year later the
talk was of hippies not beatniks, and Haight-Ashbury had supplanted North
Beach as the epicenter of hipness. There were holdovers from the beatnik
years—a little Zen Buddhism, marijuana, even the term “hippie” itself had
been used by veteran beatniks to put down young wannabes, the junior hip-
sters. But there was also the new and the shocking—LSD, Day-Glo colors,
and rock music so raw and so doggedly anticommercial that it barely sound-
ed like rock ’n’ roll. By the end of 1965, the new bohemia was electric with
possibility. Peggy Caserta, owner of Mnasidika, the Haight’s first hip bou-
tique, remembers the moment when the extent of the changes finally hit
her. It was early 1966 and she was minding her store by the corner of Haight
and Ashbury. Photographer Herb Green had just finished shooting pictures
of the scruffy, shaggy Grateful Dead outside her store when her next-door
neighbor, a barber who sensed his shop’s coming obsolescence, said,
“Peggy, what is going on here?”9 Within a year, the barbershop was gone,
replaced by another of Caserta’s stores. By 1966, convention—even history
itself—was on the verge of “coming off the leash,” and the unraveling felt in-
evitable, inexorable, sort of like an acid trip.10
News of Haight-Ashbury spread quickly as bicoastal boho kids ex-
changed tales about this strange new scene. Bob Seidemann, a photogra-
pher responsible for some of the most arresting images of the sixties, de-
cided to move there in late 1965 when he ran into a fellow New York hipster
who said, “Would you believe that people are taking LSD and dancing to rock
and roll music in San Francisco?”11 The idea was as irresistible as it was im-
plausible and the Haight began filling up with people like Seidemann who
were eager to walk away from the straight world. All over America kids who
had dropped out of the mainstream were sending their parents what Tom
Wolfe dubbed the “Beautiful People letter.” After a perfunctory apology for
having vanished without a word, the writer would then go on: “I won’t bore
you with the whole thing, how it happened, but I really tried, because I knew
you wanted me to, but it just didn’t work out with [school, college, my job,
me and Danny] and so I have come here and it really is a beautiful scene. I
don’t want you to worry about me. I have met some BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.”12
It wasn’t hard finding them, especially the guys with their Jesus Christ
hair and beards. Beautiful people dressed to underscore their freakiness,
appropriating the clothes of other times and cultures—Davy Crockett buck-
skin, military surplus, Buddhist robes, Edwardian suits, Errol Flynn pirate
shirts, Native American headbands, capes, cowboy and Beatle boots, hats—
bowlers, stove pipe, cowboy, Eskimo, anything—and beads, of course. Being
beautiful was more than copping a look, though; it was an attitude, a stance,
a vibration. Weirdness mattered, and so did a mellow vibe. Both individual-
istic (“Do your own thing”) and tribal (“Everybody get together”), the hip-
pie scene was philosophically thin: a little Eastern mysticism, eco-con-
sciousness, and the conviction that all things “natural”—with the important
exceptions of electric rock ’n’ roll and synthetic drugs like LSD (“Better Liv-
ing through Chemistry” as one poster put it)—were better.
Many factors converged to create the Haight and the hippie countercul-
ture, not the least of them drugs and rock ’n’ roll, but the shift couldn’t have
happened on the scale it did had white America not been at that moment ex-
traordinarily affluent. While white sixties rebels were rejecting America’s
relentless materialism, what playwright Arthur Miller called “a system
pouring its junk over everybody,” their revolt was subsidized and under-
written by America’s unprecedented prosperity.13 In the Haight virtually

everything, including the space, was surplus. Haight-Ashbury was itself an
almost forgotten part of the city, a working-class, interracial area bohemi-
ans began moving into when the commercialization of North Beach caused
rents to skyrocket. And in this sleepy neighborhood beatnik types didn’t
have to worry about police harassment, which had become routine in North
Beach. San Francisco State College had been located on lower Haight Street
until the early 1950s, and a few scattered student or teacher households re-
mained, giving the neighborhood a mildly boho air even before the migra-
tion from North Beach began. Because rents were cheap and the area was
one quick trolley ride to the new SF State, Haight-Ashbury began filling up
with students, graduates, dropouts and even some faculty. Two huge floors
of a once-beautiful old Victorian house went for $175 a month, or you could
rent a room in such a house, often for as little as $15 a month. Nor were the
ballrooms and theaters that were home to the new rock dances in great de-
mand either.
Beautiful people lived on leftovers, the discarded waste of a “post-
scarcity society.” In 1966, an anarchist group called the Diggers began
serving free food in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Named after a
group of seventeenth-century English radicals, the Diggers were street-
theater “guerrillas” determined to prod society out of its lethargy. The free
food wasn’t charity, but rather part of their effort to “jog consciousness,”
according to Peter Coyote, one of several San Francisco Mime Troupe ac-
tors who formed the Diggers.14 “It’s free because it’s yours,” they de-
clared.15 The food the Diggers handed out was sometimes donated by bak-
eries, produce markets, and meat markets; other times it was “liberated.”
Although the Diggers were often praised as “anonymous good guys” or a
“hip Salvation Army,” some people considered them con artists who used
the lingo of liberation to rationalize scamming anyone with even margin-
ally greater resources.16 The Diggers also ran a free store, filled with used
clothes and surplus from local companies like Levi Strauss. The Free Store
was so awash with white button-down Oxford shirts—nine-to-five wear
that drop-outs no longer needed—that a Digger woman found an ingenious
way of reclaiming them: tie dye. Before long, the new fashion was every-
where. Rejected Levi’s designs would sometimes make their way into the
Digger community, too. At one time almost all the Digger women were
wearing super-tight, silver pants made from metallic cloth—designer re-

jects from Levi Strauss.17
San Francisco’s two Army-Navy surplus stores were another source for
hip clothes, which included sturdy and dirt-cheap Navy bell-bottoms, pea
jackets and Army jackets. Truly enterprising hipsters like George Hunter,
who formed the Haight’s original rock band, the Charlatans, spent hours at
thrift stores, the Salvation Army, and Goodwill rummaging through sec-
ondhand clothing for cool Victorian and Edwardian styles. They also outfit-
ted their apartments in an “old-timey” look, using unwanted, outdated fur-
niture and appliances. Bob Seidemann remembers, “Everybody’s house
had the old-timey stove and the old-timey refrigerator even though the
fuckin’ refrigerator was lousy—the light bulb didn’t work and it didn’t get
the beer cold. They had it because it was old timey.”18 Even the overhead
projectors that light artists used during rock concerts were World War II
vintage, available at military surplus stores. Many kids lived on welfare.
Richard Hundgen, a future roadie for San Francisco bands, claims that
groups of hippies began calling themselves “families” because of their deal-
ings with the San Francisco Welfare Department. All of a sudden lots of un-
related people were living under the same roof, and welfare workers began
designating them families, he says, so they’d be eligible for food stamps.19
However, according to Peter Coyote, whose communal household survived
on three welfare checks, the Welfare Department workers were sticklers for
the rules. The department made periodic inspections of recipients’ house-
holds, and he remembers that on those occasions everyone “extraneous to
the legal definition of ‘single family’ would disappear so that the welfare
workers would always discover . . . three indigent women.”20 On the whole,
these middle-class white kids worried not about whether they’d find jobs,
but rather about how they could best avoid them.
The people of the Haight were partly driven to drop out by the “junk”—
but also by a vast sense of spiritual and emotional emptiness. Jim Haynie of
the San Francisco Mime Troupe was “tired of the gray life.”21 Like others, he
hungered for connection and an experience of intensity. Peter Coyote came
to the Haight after “twenty years of marshmallow, plastic, and hopscotch,”
determined to “lay life.” “I want to taste it, beat it, feel it, kill it, fuck it,” he
said, “and I want to have all those things done to me.”22 To the Diggers, the
way out of the gray life—“civilian living,” as one of them put it—was what
they called “life acting,” or playing for keeps, not compensating for “the
meagerness of one’s own existence” by living vicariously through others’
achievements and adventures.23 Living large and taking risks seemed the
solution. After Janis Joplin became famous, journalist Nat Hentoff once
asked if she was concerned her voice could withstand the abuse she put it
through when she sang. For her the question assumed generational signifi-
cance. She believed you could “destroy your now by worrying about tomor-
row. We look back at our parents and see how they gave up and compromised
and wound up with very little. So the kids want a lot of something now rather
than a little of hardly anything spread over seventy years.”24
And by May 1965, a UC Berkeley drop-out, Augustus Owsley Stanley III,
or “Owsley,” was providing an instant cure for the lack of emotional, intel-
lectual, and artistic stimulus that so many felt growing up in postwar Amer-
ica—lysergic acid diethylamide. LSD was legal but not widely available until
Owsley, whose grandfather had been a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, began
manufacturing it with help from his girlfriend, a former chemistry graduate
student from Berkeley. When Owsley’s acid began making its presence felt
in the Haight, people were eager to get psychedelicized and experience that
“orgasm behind the eyeballs.”25 Acid was the antidote to the “adventure
shortage.”26 Unlike most other drugs, it wasn’t about feeling good. LSD
trips were sometimes a “bummer”—originally a Hell’s Angels’ expression
for a bad motorcycle trip—but mostly spiritually cathartic, even transcen-
dent.27 Nor was LSD addictive, because, as one aficionado puts it, getting
hooked on it would be “like being addicted to having the shit beat out of
you.”28 Psychedelics (originally called psychodelics) opened up the mind to
that flood of stimuli that the brain under normal functioning reduces to a
manageable trickle, as Aldous Huxley, an earlier advocate, had explained.29
Jerry Garcia claimed that psychedelics allowed him to enter a reality he
had “always thought existed but had never been able to find.” For the most
part, acid revelations were strictly of the moment, not easily translatable.
Bob Seidemann remembers some “derelict” guy telling him during an acid
trip: “The floor is neutral and the ceiling is positive.” According to Seide-
mann, “That was a major revelation. My mind was blown, though I could
never begin to reconstruct what truth was revealed to me then.” Psyche-
delics also affected the music people listened to and played. Folkies began
to pick up electric guitars to make noise, to combat the adventure shortage,
and to match in some way the monumental stimulus—the high-voltage

charge—provided by psychedelics. The first time Phil Lesch of the Grateful
Dead plugged in, he played for seven hours straight. When the music is am-
plified, Lesch explained, “you can hear it all. That’s what the electronics
do—they amplify the overtones to a degree never thought possible in an
acoustic instrument.” Acid and electricity were a perfect match.
San Francisco’s 1965 transformation from the home of folk to the home
of acid rock happened just as dramatically. Acid hit, Bob Dylan went electric
at the Newport Folk Festival, and British rockers kept pushing the envelope
with songs like the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” 1965’s
number one single. Until the British Invasion there was little room in com-
mercial music for anything that wasn’t squeaky clean. Even the Shirelles’
“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” with its hint of premarital sex, was too
suggestive for some. When the Kingmen’s great garage-rock song “Louie,
Louie” became a huge hit in 1963, the FBI launched an investigation into the
meaning behind its slurred and garbled lyrics. While the Beatles proved the
commercial viability of cheeky pop, the Rolling Stones demonstrated there
was a market for something darker, more forbidding. Ironically, the British
Invasion conquered America with her very own music—early rock ’n’ roll,
hard-driving R&B, and the blues—black music that had been shut out of
American Top 40 radio. Hits like the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” and the
Rolling Stones’ “It’s All Over Now” had already been recorded by black mu-
sicians in the States, but most white Americans were unaware of that. What
made England’s near-stranglehold of the American charts ironic was that
mod young Brits had grown up worshipping America. “The most exciting
thing about being alive was looking at Americans,” recalls one British
writer. “America was where we all wanted to be,” not drab Britain where ra-
tioning lingered on and the economic recovery from World War II took
more than a decade.30 “The first books I ever bought were about America,”
Eric Clapton recalls. “The first records were American. I was just devoted to
the American way of life without ever having been there.”31 Just a few short
years later Americans were looking longingly at Britain, especially London’s
hip Carnaby Street, as the source of everything cool.
Like everyone else, Bob Dylan was mesmerized by the Brits. By 1966 he
was claiming folk had just been a “substitute” for rock during the late
fifties and early sixties, those years when many observers felt rock ’n’ roll
had lost its edge and devolved into teenybopper dreck.32 The English had
changed all that, he said, by revitalizing rock music. Dylan had loved the
Animals’ 1964 rock version of “The House of the Rising Sun,” a folk song
he’d sung on his first album. When he toured England in 1965, he had hung
out with the Animals and the Beatles, and had fooled around in the studio
with Britain’s premier blues band, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Other
U.S. folk musicians, including the Cambridge purists, were also smitten by
the Beatles. Dylan’s sidekick, the painter and guitarist Bob Neuwirth, was
“taken” with the way they had moved “European harmonies into an Everly
Brothers sack, shaking them up with rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly beat and
throwing them back across the Atlantic.”33 Even in notoriously snooty
Greenwich Village, folk music veterans were intrigued, recalls John Sebas-
tian, who would form the Lovin’ Spoonful. In California, folkies David
Crosby, Gene Clark, and Roger (Jim) McGuinn were “Beatle struck” after
seeing “A Hard Day’s Night.” Crosby remembers “coming out of that movie
so jazzed that I was swinging around stop sign poles at arm’s length. I knew
right then what my life was going to be. I wanted to do that. I loved the at-
titude and the fun of it; there was sex, there was joy, there was everything I
wanted out of life.”34 The three musicians formed the Byrds with Chris
Hillman and Michael Clarke and quickly had a smash hit in the spring of
1965 with their folk-rock cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Neuwirth recalls hearing the Byrd’s electric version as he sat with Dylan
and Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager. “It was great because no one could
figure out how anyone except Peter, Paul, and Mary could ever cover any of
Bob’s songs.”35 According to Roger McGuinn, when Dylan first heard the
Byrds’ version of his song he said, “Wow, man, you can dance to it.”36
Much is made of Dylan’s plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965,
but as Cambridge folkies Eric Von Schmidt and Jim Rooney point out, Dylan
had already made his intentions known earlier that year on his fifth album,
the half-acoustic half-electric Bringing It All Back Home. So mercurial his
friend Richard Fariña once dubbed him the “plastic man,” Dylan was rein-
venting himself, just the first of many reincarnations.37 The album cover
shows Dylan “in the lap of outrageous luxury. Albert Grossman’s wife, Sally,
desirable, elegant, aloof, in flame-red, reclines behind Bob . . . Dylan’s at-
tire is early English mod: French cuffs, button collar, no tie. . . . It was an op-
tical celebration of opulence and disdain. A visual open letter to the Old Folk
Guard: Kiss off.”38 Dylan summoned the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, an in-
terracial Chicago blues group, to back him at Newport because it was the only
American band that came close to sounding like England’s Bluesbreakers.
Dylan’s electric set, like the Butterfield Band’s earlier set, antagonized the
acoustic ideologues. Dylan’s performance was especially jarring coming on
the heels of traditional folksinger Cousin Emmie’s set, which included the
hopelessly hokey “Turkey in the Straw.” Under-rehearsed and ragged-
sounding, Dylan’s makeshift electric ensemble sped through three songs at
ear-splitting volume. Musicologist Alan Lomax and folksinger Pete Seeger,
both festival board members, were furious with Dylan and the sound mixers
who refused to turn down the volume. A distraught Seeger yelled, “If I had an
axe, I’d cut the cable right now!” Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary sup-
ported Dylan’s right to go electric but says it felt like a “capitulation to the
enemy—as if all a sudden you saw Martin Luther King, Jr. doing a cigarette
ad.”39 However, Dylan wasn’t making music to please the old or young fogeys
of folk; he was looking to beat the English at their own game. Producer Paul
Rothchild, who would work with the Doors and Janis Joplin, recalls listening
to a rough mix of “Like a Rolling Stone” with Dylan and Neuwirth. They’d al-
ready played it about twenty-five times when Rothchild showed up, and were
“grinning like a couple of cats who’d swallowed canaries.” Rothchild soon
understood why. “What I realized while I was sitting there was that one of
US—one of the so-called Village folksingers—was making music that would
compete with all of THEM—the Beatles and the Stones and the Dave Clark
Five—without sacrificing any of the integrity of folk music or the power of
rock ’n’ roll.”40
Dylan could count among his greatest supporters the poet Allen Gins-
berg. According to music critic Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle,
Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ken Kesey and two Hell’s Angels sat to-
gether in the front row at Dylan’s Berkeley concert in December 1965. To
those who argued Dylan had sold out, Ginsberg replied, “Dylan has sold out
to God. That is to say, his command was to spread his beauty as wide as pos-
sible. It was an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox.
And he proved that it can.”41 With Ginsberg weighing in on his side, Dylan
seemed to have pulled off the impossible—reconciling the artistic with the
commercial. For San Francisco folkies the ramifications were felt immedi-
ately. “When Dylan went electric,” recalls Bill Belmont, then a San Francis-
co State student, “everybody went out and bought an electric guitar. Literal-
ly! That was the end of the beatnik movement and the beginning of electric
rock ’n’ roll as we know it.”42
American prosperity, acid, the British Invasion, and Dylan’s plugging in
were the catalysts that sparked the hippie revolution, and San Francisco was
uniquely poised to respond to the shift. Just south of the city in La Honda
lived Ken Kesey, author of the much-acclaimed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. Kesey had been psychedelicized in 1960 when he’d signed up as a $75-
a-day guinea pig in an experiment at a local Veteran’s Administration hos-
pital. Kesey and his friends—the self-proclaimed Merry Pranksters—were
acid proselytizers who began turning on San Franciscans in 1965. In con-
trast to the other major acid outlet, Timothy Leary’s operation in Millbrook,
New York, which appealed to an elite group of writers, artists and jazz musi-
cians, the Pranksters turned on anyone and everyone at their public hap-
penings, or “Acid Tests.” And while Timothy Leary devised a cautious pro-
tocol for tripping, which emphasized the creation of a controlled
environment (“set and setting”), the Pranksters would urge the people they
dosed to “freak freely,” their solution to the unpredictability of an acid trip.
Unlike Millbrook, which was all cool and meditative—“one big piece of up-
tight constipation” to the Pranksters—Acid Tests featured rock music, weird
electronic noodling, and spoken-word experiments.43”Lumpenbeatnik”
Jerry Garcia and the Warlocks (soon to be the Grateful Dead) became the
Pranksters’ house band, and would play loud rock ’n’ roll on a sound system
purchased by their biggest supporter, acid king Owsley.44
San Francisco quickly became the scene of wild parties, of which the
Pranksters’ were the most off-the-wall. The Bay Area boasted a “huge
party circuit” in the mid-sixties because there were so few venues for live
music.45 Many of the party-goers were students at San Francisco State and
the San Francisco Art Institute—people who later formed the core audi-
ence at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium and Chet Helms’s Avalon ball-
room. The parties evolved not only from the music and acid scenes, but
also from political protest. The Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley in
1964 had given rise to more protests as activists looked beyond the cam-
pus to end racial discrimination in San Francisco’s restaurants, hotels,
and auto dealerships and, of course, to rally against the escalating war in
Vietnam. Berkeley politicos stayed clear of the Haight, but the same wasn’t
true of the activists at San Francisco State. In fact, political demonstrations

were often followed by big bashes, and dissenters of all persuasions—the po-
litical and cultural radicals—seemed to gravitate to each other. Boho kids
like George Hunter of the Charlatans would mix with activists like Tracy
Simms, the black woman who helped lead the successful protest against
racial discrimination at the Sheraton Palace Hotel.46 One of the most visible
left-wing San Francisco groups, The Du Bois Club—dominated by red diaper
babies, children of Communists, and fellow travelers—was famous for its
post-demo parties. Terence Hallinan, a cofounder of the local Du Bois Club,
was well-known to the Haight’s musicians and artists. Other members in-
cluded Bill Resner, who with his brother, Hillel, would open the Haight’s
electric ballroom, the Straight Theater, and Luria Castell, who claimed to
have met Che Guevara in Cuba, but who now resided at 2111 Pine Street, a
notorious hippie house where life was “one giant party.”47 There was no ef-
fort to bring together these two groups until Yippie was formed later in the
decade, but San Francisco’s freaks and politicos clearly felt some affinity
with one another. Even rock musicians—probably the least activist element
within the Haight—played benefits for political groups.48
San Francisco’s artistic ferment was a multimedia happening, involving
not only politicos, Pranksters and musicians, but artists, dancers, poets,
and actors. Although it was the “San Francisco Sound” that grabbed jour-
nalists, the first rock ’n’ roll dances featured poets, dancers, theater
troupes, and light show artists. One of Big Brother and the Holding Compa-
ny’s first gigs was “The Blast,” a multimedia event that drummer Dave Getz
says was “way ahead of its time. There was a rock ’n’ roll band on one side of
the stage, a free jazz ensemble on the other side of the stage, with dancers in
the middle, light projections and this black operatic singer, Crystal Mazur,
who was like what Diamanda Galas is now. Years ahead of her time. They
projected comics on the screen and she sang the words. Sometimes both
bands would be playing. It was totally spontaneous. It was so avant-garde,
no one’s ever heard of it.”49
In fact, the Bay Area had a thriving avant-garde. The San Francisco po-
etry renaissance, spearheaded by Kenneth Rexroth in the late forties, had
put the city on the literary map. The experimental Anna Halprin Dance
Company created quite a stir with its nude dancing; the Tape Music Center
was home to experimental electronic musicians Pauline Oliveras, Ramon
Sender, Morton Subotnik, Zack Stewart, and Steve Reich. This small but
vital community of avant-garde artists also included Berkeley’s Open The-
ater; an improvisational troupe, The Committee; and the American Conser-
vatory Theater (ACT) from which Ronny Davis split to form the lefty San
Francisco Mime Troupe, which performed hard-hitting political satire, not
pantomime. Painters Joan Brown, Wally Hedrick, and Jay DeFeo were part
of the mix as well. The Pacifica radio station, KPFA, brought artists and in-
tellectuals together; KPFA regulars included Kenneth Rexroth on books,
Pauline Kael on film, Alan Watts on philosophy, and Ralph Gleason on jazz.
Despite all the activity, outsiders treated the Bay Area’s art scene as if it were
a mere echo of New York’s—an idea that made local writers and artists bris-
tle. When Tom Wolfe asked Ken Kesey if an Acid Test was like “what Andy
Warhol is doing in New York?” Kesey’s chilly reply was, “No offense. But
New York is about two years behind.”50
The light show, for instance, was a San Francisco innovation, invented
by Seymour Locks, an art professor, in the early fifties. Unlike the light
shows associated with Timothy Leary or Andy Warhol, in which static images
were projected, Locks projected light through glass dishes filled with paint,
which he would swirl and stir to trippy effect. He taught the technique to
student Elias Romero who in the early sixties became the “real Johnny Ap-
pleseed of light shows” in the Bay Area.51 Romero began collaborating with
painter Bill Ham, and by the spring of 1965 Ham was presenting light shows
in his Pine Street basement, sometimes to classical music and sometimes
with a group of jazz musicians from an after-hours club around the corner.
Alton Kelley, the future poster artist, recalls someone inviting him to Ham’s
place for a light show. “What the fuck’s a light show?” he asked. He went
along, wondering, “What’s he gonna do, turn on little light bulbs?” Instead
“the windows were blacked out, the lights went off and the music started.
Then little dots started to move and swirl and change colors.” The image was
like a “moving abstract painting,” projected against the wall.52
Light shows, rock ’n’ roll, psychedelics—by late 1965 the hallmarks of
the hippie era were all in place. Today, however, hardly anyone at the fore-
front of the “sixties” will admit to having been a hippie. Dave Getz, the
drummer in Big Brother and the Holding Company, claims, “I never called
myself a hippie, ever. I hated it.” Peter Berg of the Mime Troupe and the
Diggers says he never thought of himself as a hippie.53 “White kids who
weren’t that hip,” was the Digger view, and that of many other Haight pio-
neers who were older than the kids who later flooded into the Haight.54
Photographer Bob Seidemann maintains, “We called ourselves freaks,
never hippies.” Carl Gottlieb, a writer, says, “hippies were the people who
borrowed your truck and didn’t return it.” Pat “Sunshine” Nichols, who
made pot brownies for the Avalon Ballroom and whose name alone seems
incontrovertible proof she was a hippie, insists she was a beatnik instead.
Hippies, she explains, were “people who just kind of showed up and didn’t
seem to have any sense. They didn’t know how to take care of themselves.
They didn’t know how to wash their clothes, hold down a job, or make sure
they were going to live through it.”
At the time, the Diggers actually denounced the whole hippie image as a
“Love Hoax” and claimed the hip Haight merchants who perpetrated it were
trying to mask “the overall grime of the Haight-Ashbury reality.”55 Many
longtime habitués of the neighborhood blamed the notion of hippies on the
media. Milan Melvin, who worked at San Francisco’s first underground radio
station, still snarls at the word. To him, hippies were the wannabes who
flooded Haight-Ashbury when Scott McKenzie’s insipid ode to the Emerald
City, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” hit the
charts just before June 1967’s Monterey International Pop Festival. That
song, he argues, “was the real last nail in the coffin. The squares were on the
march, kicking down little old ladies’ picket fences to get flowers in their
hair so they could arrive dressed to the code described in the papers.”56
The flower child wasn’t invented out of whole cloth by the media, how-
ever. Reporters could always find young people who fit the profile easily
enough. Chet Helms was among those willing to oblige reporters. Bob Sim-
mons, who worked at Helms’s Avalon Ballroom, recalls the press thinking
Chet “looked ‘just perfect.’ Him in that Afghani leather jacket . . . preaching
love, enlightenment, renaissance, etc. Mostly everyone just said, ‘Go Chet,
talk to the press, say what you want, just help keep the party going.”’57
Meanwhile, journalists intent on hyping the hippie codified and popular-
ized a caricature that kids then came looking to become. Before long, the
myth was set in stone: hippies and beatniks were polar opposites. Whereas
the beatniks were all doom and gloom, the hippies were all dopey optimism.
It was never that simple, though. Before the media descended on the
Haight like an invading army, hippie and beatnik coexisted, one shading
into the other. Both the underground and mainstream press used hippie and
beatnik interchangeably until the spring of 1967. In fact, when hippie first
appeared in the press in a September 1965 San Francisco Examiner article
trumpeting Haight-Ashbury as “a sort of ‘West Beach,”’ the headline read,
“A New Paradise For Beatniks.”58 In 1963 when David Crosby met Michael
Clarke, with whom he later played in the Byrds, Clarke was driving around
in an old mail van and carried a conga drum. This was “standard hippie gear,
only this was before anybody was calling them hippies,” Crosby recalls.
“They were still beatniks.”59
In a long essay on hippies in the New York Times Magazine, journalist
Hunter S. Thompson acknowledged the nuanced connection between the
two groups. Hippies, he reported, “reject any kinship with the Beat Gener-
ation on the ground that ‘those cats were negative, but our thing is positive.’
They also reject politics, which is ‘just another game.’ They don’t like
money, either, or any kind of aggressiveness.” However, Thompson did
note that if love was the “password” in the Haight, paranoia was the “style,”
and that the ex-beatniks in the love crowd saw hippies as “second-genera-
tion beatniks” rather than a “whole new breed.”60 Years later Jerry Garcia
claimed greater affinity with the Beats: “the media portrait of the innocent
hippie flower child was a joke. Hey, everybody knew what was happening. It
wasn’t that innocent. Our own background was sort of that deeply cynical
beatnik space which evolved into something nicer with the advent of psy-
chedelics.”61 Bob Seidemann puts it more starkly, “Fuck the Love Genera-
tion! That was bullshit, man. That was a scam. It was always a dark, eraser-
head world.”62 Hippies might blather on to the press about peace and
love—and, as Garcia and Seidemann suggest, this was sometimes a strategic
deflection from what was actually happening—but it was the desire to “lay
life,” to live recklessly, that defined the Haight-Ashbury experience.63
Garcia and Seidemann saw the darkness, but the media was slow to see
the “apocalyptic edge” of “what looked like a huge party in perpetual
progress.”64 In fact, the media sometimes treated hippies like comic relief,
a diversion from race riots, assassinations, and the horror of the ever-esca-
lating war in Vietnam. But despite the talk of dropping out of straight Amer-
ica, there was no escaping the larger culture. For young unmarried men not
enrolled in school, which was most of the Haight’s male population, the
draft and the nightmare of serving (and possibly dying) in the jungles of
Vietnam hung over their heads. And as the war heated up it became harder
to avoid being drafted. Claiming you were gay or showing up at an induction
center toothpick-thin, zonked out from drugs and lack of sleep—common
strategies—didn’t always work anymore.
Listening to the “hippie” music of the time, one hears almost as much
dread and foreboding as flower-power goofiness. For every “Get Togeth-
er,” or “Wooden Ships” there’s a song like the Buffalo Springfield’s “For
What It’s Worth,” with its memorable line: “Paranoia strikes deep/Into
your heart it will creep.”65 Darby Slick’s “Somebody to Love,” which opens
with the line “When the truth is found to be lies/and all the joy within you
dies” doesn’t sound much like a Love Generation tune. Nor does Country
Joe and the Fish’s antiwar anthem “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die Rag.”
When Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane sings “White Rabbit” it’s not
bubbly acid enthusiasm you hear in her voice, but something closer to
menace. The musicians themselves were not always emissaries of peace
and love either. Light show artist Joshua White remembers the first time he
encountered the new bands at Toronto’s O’Keefe Center in late 1967. “For
us this show was the San Francisco Scene—the good vibes, the love—com-
ing to Toronto. What came to Toronto, however, was an extremely unpleas-
ant group of people known as the Jefferson Airplane and a very strange
bunch of kinda hostile guys known as the Grateful Dead. And then there
was the Headlights Light Show which was two guys who were fighting with
each other.”66 It should have been obvious that, as Darby Slick puts it,
there was a “darker side” to all this.67
Which is not to say that hippies were no different from beatniks. Even
though Allen Ginsberg palled it up with the Pranksters and Neal Cassady ac-
tually drove their bus, not all the Beats were so enthralled. Kerouac, for one,
walked out of the Prankster party Ginsberg and Cassady had taken him to.
Kerouac didn’t like the ear-splitting rock ’n’ roll and he was offended that
the young hipsters had draped an American flag across the back of a sofa.
Kerouac walked away from the party, but not before rescuing the flag.68 Poet
Diane Di Prima moved easily in both bohemian worlds and wouldn’t have
been rattled by the Prankster party. But she maintains that these “were two
different lineages. Those kids were raised softer than we were,” not having
“witnessed the blacklisting, the Rosenbergs, and the insanity of World War
II. That’s a different world.”69 To Kerouac, whose iconic status as America’s
best-known Beat brought him both painful opprobrium and debilitating

celebrity, it wasn’t just that the Pranksters’ rebellion seemed superficial,
rooted only in the pursuit of the outrageous, but that Kesey and company
pulled it all off with such cocky confidence, as though they knew they’d get
away with it.
Indeed, the Pranksters took chances the Beats never dared to take. Al-
though both Beats and hippies were nomadic, on vacation from work and
the consumption it subsidized, the Beats traveled unobtrusively, while the
Pranksters advertised their weirdness as only those who feel untouchable
can, crossing the country in a 1939 school bus, painted in a rainbow of
Day-Glo colors. The Pranksters represented, in the words of Tom Wolfe,
“something wilder and weirder out on the road.”70 If the Day-Glo paint
didn’t attract the cops, the words emblazoned on the bus—“Furthur” in
front and “Caution: Weird Load” in back—did. Compared to the Beats,
hippies seemed positively adolescent, or even younger. After all, it wasn’t
a car the Pranksters were driving but a school bus, the traditional site of
childhood pranks. What better place for their public put-ons or “pranks”?
The Beats had never felt the sense of immunity or limitless possibility that
characterized the mid-sixties, however fleetingly. The Dead may have
come out of a “cynical beatnik space,” but they were drawn to the Beatles
by their movies which Garcia described as “very high and very up.” That,
he said, “looked better than down and out.”71
Race, sexuality, and gender played themselves out differently, too. For
Beats, blacks had signified hipness; the new bohemians, whether out of
choice or necessity (by the mid-sixties, black power was beginning to
eclipse fantasies of integration), insisted on their own hipness—Kesey
claimed to have “outniggered” blacks, as he put it.72 Contrary to Tom Wolfe’s
claim, African Americans weren’t completely irrelevant to the new bo-
hemia, but neither did they occupy the central position they once had. The
Diggers did stop by the Oakland headquarters of the Black Panther Party
with a box of fish—sole, to be specific—and reportedly suggested that the
party begin a breakfast program for kids.73 However, there was virtually no
connection between San Francisco’s black community and white counter-
culture. And whereas the Beat scene had been, if anything, queer-inflected,
the hippie counterculture was relentlessly straight, even homophobic. All
the talk of free love brought lots of gay people to San Francisco, but the
Haight was “overwhelmingly heterosexual.”74 Timothy Leary even pro-

claimed LSD “a specific cure for homosexuality.”75 Even the more political-
ly-minded Diggers harbored the same clichéd ideas about gay men as the
larger culture. When Digger Emmett Grogan broke up a 1967 SDS meeting,
he shouted at the startled group, “Faggots! Fags! . . . You haven’t got the balls
to go mad. You gonna make a revolution?—you’ll piss in your pants when the
violence erupts.”76
Nor were relations between women and men quite the same as what had
prevailed in the beatnik world. The Beat vision was explicitly masculine.
Kerouac even claimed the “core” of the “Beat Generation” was “a swinging
group of American men intent on joy.”77 By contrast, Kesey and company
were sexist for sure, but coed. In fact, if the Beats were about escaping the
family, hippies were about reconstituting it, in all its inequality. “Hippies
treat their women like squaws,” was reportedly the blunt assessment of the
mother of the Grateful Dead’s co-manager, Danny Rifkin.78 Certainly, for
women, the so-called sexual revolution was a mixed blessing. Women were
having more sex (and with less guilt), but they were also more sexually vul-
nerable. Instead of undoing the deeply rooted sexual double standard, free
love only masked it in countercultural pieties. Nor did hippie households
pioneer an alternative to the traditional division of labor. Although many
hippie guys managed to avoid nine-to-five jobs, few hippie girls avoided
housework. Baking, cooking, sewing, tending the children were a “women’s
thing.” As Bob Seidemann points out, relations between men and women in
the Haight were “old timey,” like the furniture. “The hippie ethos was a car-
toon image of a woman making an apple pie and setting it on the windowsill
while Dad, having toiled in the marijuana fields for the noble quest of sell-
ing pot, carefully folds it in plastic Baggies.”79 The Diggers were no better.
The men talked ideas, wrote broadsides, and worked on cars while the
women used their feminine wiles to wangle food out of the guys manning
the produce stands and meat markets they cruised. Reflecting on those
years, Peter Coyote admits that the gendered division of labor in the Diggers
now “seems archaic, particularly for a visionary community.”80
To Joan Didion, all the talk in the Haight about “the woman’s trip”—her
supposedly unique talent as housekeeper, mother, and all-purpose care-
taker—seemed like nothing so much as Betty Friedan’s “feminine mys-
tique”; the sense of emancipation hippie women professed demonstrated,
she argued, people’s ability “to be the unconscious instruments of values

they would strenuously reject on a conscious level.”81 In truth, most people
in the Haight—women included—wouldn’t have rejected sexism even had
they been aware of its presence in their lives. When Travis Rivers, manager
of Haight-Ashbury’s psychedelic newspaper, the Oracle, proposed to his
staff that the paper organize a roundtable discussion on women’s issues
with hip sex worker Margo St. James, poet Lenore Kandel, and Janis Joplin,
“there ensued a huge fight and virtually the entire staff quit.”82 Writer and
actor Carl Gottlieb believes the rigid gender roles clearly reflected “patriar-
chal” attitudes.83 “The vast majority of women in that scene were subordi-
nate to men,” Seidemann admits, but they seemed more than happy to be
that way. “The women all wanted children real bad. Get pregnant, have the
kid, and hit the welfare office.”84 The women of the Haight were having sex
with lots of different men and living in alternative families, but they were
still expected, and many of them still wanted to be, pregnant and depend-
ent. In this way, the counterculture was even less hospitable to ambitious,
creative women than the older beatnik subculture where women could at
least occasionally gain entry by acting like one of the guys.
acid and rock were transforming San Francisco’s bohemia, but the ele-
ments came together hundreds of miles away at the Red Dog Saloon, a hip
bar and restaurant that opened the summer of 1965 in Virginia City, Neva-
da.85 The Red Dog was originally conceived as a folk nightclub that would
book musicians traveling between coasts, but with San Francisco’s first hip-
pie rock band, the Charlatans, handling the music and Pine Streeters Bill
Ham and Bob Cohen doing the light show, it became the first hippie rock
saloon instead.86 For baby boomers raised on a steady diet of Westerns, the
Red Dog, which was modeled on the saloon in Gunsmoke, was a dream come
true. The men outfitted themselves with guns and quick-draw outfits. For
Cohen, who spent the whole summer there, it was “vanishing America. . . .
This was the Wild West, a big fantasy world where you could be whoever you
wanted to be.” Mostly, people copped an old-timey look. “That’s where all
the fringe and the leather came from, which became such a big part of that
whole hippie image,” explains Cohen.87
When the summer ended, the Pine Street group (now calling themselves
the Family Dog) returned to San Francisco. Inspired by the Red Dog, they
decided to put on rock ’n’ roll dances. No one wanted to give up dancing,
which is one sign that the sixties were truly on—having fun and showing it
were a clear break with the cool coffeehouse culture. Luria Castell suggest-
ed the Family Dog hold its dances in the meeting hall of the International
Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. Jim Haynie of the Mime
Troupe says the choice “was kind of poetic in a way because of what [red-
baited] Harry Bridges and the West Coast Longshoremen’s Union repre-
sented—lefty philosophy and the working man, the working person. . . . We
felt some poetry in being aligned with the most maligned people.”88 The
Family Dog named its first dance “A Tribute to Dr. Strange” after the Mar-
vel Comics character.89 Alton Kelley designed the poster, which was plas-
tered all over town. Bill Ham did the lights and the Great Society, the Char-
latans, and the Jefferson Airplane all played. General admission was $2.50
and $2 for students.
Somewhere between four hundred and twelve hundred people showed
up at the Longshoremen’s Hall the night of October 16, 1965. That weekend
fourteen thousand protestors from across the western states gathered to
march on the Oakland induction center in the Bay Area’s first big antiwar
demonstration. Turned back by the police on the first day, and by the Hell’s
Angels on the second day, some of the protesters found their way to the Fam-
ily Dog dance. Allen Ginsberg, who’d spoken at the march, was, like others,
“astonished” by the “energy in the air and the number of strange people.”90
Alton Kelley remembers being “stunned by all the freaks who showed up. I
didn’t know there were that many freaks in town because we thought we were
the cool guys.”91 The shock of recognition hit everyone. As he surveyed the
crowd Chet Helms marveled, “They can’t bust us all.”92 Darby Slick main-
tains everyone was overwhelmed with the “certainty of the birth of a
scene.”93 Music critic Ralph Gleason wrote about the dance in his San Fran-
cisco Chronicle column, alerting more people to the emerging scene.94
The Family Dog envisioned its dances transforming San Francisco into
“the American Liverpool,” but despite its role in launching the scene, its
members weren’t around long enough to preside over the transformation.95
The person who presided over San Francisco’s transformation was Bill Gra-
ham, the business manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and some-
one who knew nothing about rock or folk music. Graham was in charge of
organizing a benefit for the troupe, which had just been busted for per-
forming in the park without a permit after the Parks Commission had can-
celed its permit for alleged obscenity. Graham’s November 6th benefit hap-
pened right on the heels of the first Family Dog dance, and featured poet
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, The Committee, jazz saxophonist John Handy,
folksinger Sandy Bull, and two rock groups—the Jefferson Airplane and the
Fugs from New York. Almost four thousand people showed up at the Mime
Troupe’s loft, which held only six hundred. Many people were turned away
at the door, but the troupe still took in $4,200 that night. The next benefit
was held at the much larger Fillmore in the heart of the black Fillmore dis-
trict. The three benefits staged by Graham were the “towering cultural
events leading to Haight-Ashbury,” according to Peter Berg of the Mime
Troupe. A real “cultural revolution.” Robert Scheer, editor of the radical
magazine Ramparts, recalls driving up to the benefit on the back of Gra-
ham’s motor scooter and finding “this fucking line going around the build-
ing. It was incredible. People were all around . . . We were saying things like,
‘Wow! Wow!’ Then Bill turned around on the motor scooter and said to me,
‘This is the business of the future.”’96
Chet Helms, manager of the rock group Big Brother and the Holding
Company, saw the dollar signs, too, and soon opened up a smaller, funkier
dance hall, the Avalon Ballroom.97 Helms’s style was mellow hippie, where-
as Graham, who was first and foremost a businessman, had a surfeit of what
some would call “negative energy.” Despite their considerable differences,
Graham and Helms represented a new breed of rock promoters. Unlike
Dick Clark and Murray the K, whose teen cavalcade shows treated rock mu-
sicians like “pop plebes,” they treated musicians like artists. Both Helms
and Graham put on eclectic shows, mixing popular hippie bands with R&B,
blues, or jazz acts little known to their young white audiences.
The way that Graham and Helms stumbled into rock promotion was typ-
ical of the San Francisco rock world of the mid-sixties. Just about every-
thing in this scene was makeshift. Bands were often managed by friends
whose sole business experience, if they had any at all, was as smalltime
marijuana dealers. At first there was none of the extravagance that came to
characterize big-time rock ’n’ roll—no limos, fancy hotels, or contract rid-
ers stipulating what brands of liquor, or kinds of food, or color of M&Ms
were required backstage. Of course, the performers were not in a position
to ask for much because they were amateurs themselves, folkies who had
little experience playing electric rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, the bands were often
accidental, the result of chance meetings and shared moments of stoned-
out bliss. For better or for worse, they were committed to eclecticism and
experimentation, drawing on everything from free-form jazz and jug band
music to Indian ragas. To the extent there was a “San Francisco sound” it
consisted of extended jamming and soloing. Even if the bands had wanted
to perform tight, concise songs, they lacked the chops to do so. Blues and
R&B aficionados were often offended by the sloppiness of their playing.98
“The Dead could barely play ‘In the Midnight Hour,”’ griped blues player
Steve Miller, “and they played it for 45 minutes.”99 But for San Francisco
bands professionalism was viewed as an impediment to innovation.100 “It
was very hard to show anyone anything then,” concedes Sam Andrew of Big
Brother, Janis Joplin’s band. “Everyone wanted to arrive at whatever it was
by experimentation.”101
Musicians like Andrew were a part of the Haight and it took a while be-
fore the audience deified them. “The music was the thing, not the musi-
cians,” says Jim Haynie, who managed the Fillmore for Bill Graham. “You
knew the band and you dug the sound and you might even know some guys’
names and stuff. But it wasn’t like everybody was dying to meet them. You
were going to hear the music.” In fact, at this point, the audience could
barely see the musicians. “There were no stage lights on the performers,”
according to Haynie. “We had one 750-watt ellipsoidal on the balcony that
never moved and was one hundred feet away or something. It was very dim.
All the light was from the light show spilling onto the stage.”102 Most mu-
sicians preferred to be shrouded in darkness. “You didn’t want spotlights,”
says Bill Belmont, who later road managed Country Joe and the Fish.103 San
Francisco bands preferred light shows to bright lights because they were
unwilling or unable to provide any visual stimulation. “The musicians
barely did anything,” according to New York light show artist Joshua White.
“They just played, and often with their backs to the audience. They would
tune and tune and tune between songs. No one wanted to do a slick show.
Anyone who did a really tight show in that very modest period of time—
about two years—was considered slick and not authentic.”104 Musicians
counted themselves part of the community, not entertainers. In fact,
pulling the musicians off the dance floor and getting them on stage could
be tough.
The scene was primitive and funky, with none of the big money and glitz
that would soon come to characterize rock music. Which is not to say that
the San Francisco rock world was an Edenic community of equals beyond
the reach of commerce. The musicians might have mixed with the audience,
but they were set off by an aura of superior hipness. Nor were they indiffer-
ent to money. Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane got into rock ’n’ roll
because, he says, “some of my friends were making five thousand a night as
the Byrds.”105 None of the bands—not even the Dead, whose scraggly, scowl-
ing keyboardist, Pigpen, was always scaring off record companies—was op-
posed to making money. The bands wanted high-paying gigs and lucrative
recording contracts, but they didn’t want to go the show business route.
Show business—its crassness, insincerity, and indifference to the artistic—
was the enemy. San Francisco musicians weren’t going to churn out two-
and-a-half minute bubblegum hits to please record companies and radio
programmers; nor were they going to tone down their style so they could ap-
pear on American Bandstand or be featured in Sixteen magazine. They were
auteurs, not crowd-pleasing entertainers. When Bill Graham suggested that
the Airplane go back onstage and give a bow after a spectacular three-hour
performance, Paul Kantner snarled, “Fuck that. That’s show business.”106
despite their hostility to show business, by late 1966 the San Francis-
co bands were generating some buzz in the music business. But with the
exception of the Jefferson Airplane, whose “Somebody to Love” was the
number three single in the nation by June 1967, the bands had not broken
out nationally. Everything changed with June 1967’s Monterey Interna-
tional Pop Festival. Woodstock grabbed all the headlines two years later,
but Monterey, which was attended by anywhere from 55,000 to 90,000
people, was a landmark, the festival that made the “San Francisco sound”
and signaled that what was happening on the streets of Haight-Ashbury
was going national. America was turning. Otis Redding performed there
and marveled at the scene: “They’re smoking dope and shit like it’s legal
out here.”107 For Redding and many others, the scene at Monterey looked
like nothing short of a “cultural revolution.”108 Although Redding, Jimi
Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Who gave knockout performances that
weekend, the real star of the festival was the San Francisco scene—its
music, light shows, and groovy vibe.
Monterey Pop lasted only three days, but its reverberations were still
being felt years later. The whole rock juggernaut—not just Woodstock—had
its origins in the festival.109 Within months Jann Wenner launched Rolling
Stone magazine, featuring, ironically, a cover story lambasting the festival’s
promoters for lining their own pockets. Record companies that had scorned
rock ’n’ roll as music that “smells but sells,” now courted rock musicians
and made Rolling Stone required reading for their executives.110 An especial-
ly “happy accident” for the music industry, Monterey Pop spawned “the
next billion dollar business,” in the words of rock critic Robert Christgau.111
In 1962, record sales totaled $500 million; by 1996 they grossed over 20 bil-
lion, largely on the basis of rock ’n’ roll.112 Until this shift, rock musicians,
however popular, were the “low guys on the totem pole,” who earned far less
money than what they made for others. On tour, rock acts had been con-
signed to the world of lousy flat rates, while “class” acts like Danny Thomas
and Harry Belafonte received 60 percent of the gross, always a more lucra-
tive arrangement. As rock music became more lucrative, booking agents
began bucking the system whereby rock was “subsidizing the Thomases and
Belafontes.” They started demanding 60 percent for the rock acts they rep-
resented, not the standard $5,000 flat fee that rock bands received.113 No
longer the “asshole” of the entertainment industry, rock musicians were
now in a better position to negotiate with record companies and promoters,
and to make money for themselves.114
As soon as the San Francisco sound became commercially viable, left-
leaning rock journalists began questioning whether the music business
wasn’t co-opting the Haight-Ashbury rock underground. Within a year of
Monterey, critic Christgau complained that “art and social commentary
were absorbed, almost painlessly, by the world’s schlockiest business.” Cit-
ing as evidence a trade journal’s review of a new single as “ ‘a highly com-
mercial rock allegory of perishing society,”’ he groused, “apparently, soci-
ety itself would perish before the record industry.”115 Humorist Cynthia
Heimel recalls the time in June 1967 that she and her hippie friends spied a
press kit for Moby Grape, one of the new San Francisco bands. “It looked
psychedelic, yet it was done by ad people. I believe the word ‘hype’ was
coined that very day.”116
Sixties rockers’ refusal of show business and their position within the
counterculture led some writers to conclude that the musicians had set out
to change the world and were co-opted and transformed instead. However,
the commercial takeover of the new rock wasn’t the straightforward assault
that myth has made of it. The co-optation thesis both exaggerates the bands’
hostility to the music industry and minimizes the significance of the cultur-
al revolt wrought by sixties rock musicians.117 San Francisco bands promot-
ed sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll and saw themselves as an alternative to AM
teenybopper fare, but they were never averse to making money, much less at
war with capitalism. In 1967 Bob Weir of the Dead told a reporter that “If the
industry is gonna want us, they’re gonna take us the way we are. Then, if the
money comes in, it’ll be a stone gas.”118 Once the money began coming in—
and it did for many of the bands—they did what successful performers have
always done—they bought fancy cars and expensive homes. The Jefferson
Airplane even became flaks for Levi’s jeans, though the company’s labor
practices had come under attack.
The bands may have allowed themselves to be “swallowed by the vora-
cious maw of corporate America,” but they nonetheless transformed the
country’s cultural landscape in the process.119 The Airplane’s manager Bill
Thompson recalls the band’s gig at Grinnell College’s homecoming dance. It
was the fall of 1966, and there they were in Iowa: “All the girls were in ruffled
dresses all the way down to the ankles with corsages, and their families were
there. We started the light show and we had three sets to do that night. The
first set, it was like we were from Mars. Guys with haircuts like Dobie Gillis
were standing there and staring at us.” The parents ducked out early, and by
the second set “people started dancing a little bit. . . . The third set, people
went nuts. Off came the corsages. Shoes were coming off. Guys were ripping
off their ties. They went nuts. It was one of the greatest feelings I ever had. It
was like the turning of America in a way. We went out and played everywhere
and did that. We were the first band to do that out of San Francisco.”120
Certainly Janis Joplin saw herself as a cultural provocateur. “Kids from
the Midwest, their whole fucking thing is to sit in row Q47 and be still . . .
It’s never occurred to them that they could not go in the army. You know, it’s
a thing I do . . . If you can get them once, man, get them standing up when
they should be sitting down, sweaty when they should be decorous . . . I
think you sort of switch on their brain, man, so that makes them say: ‘Wait a
minute, maybe I can do anything.”’121 Joplin understood the irony of her
situation and relished exploiting it. “People aren’t supposed to be like me,
sing like me, make out like me, drink like me, live like me; but now they’re
paying me $50,000 a year for me to be like me. That’s what I hope I mean to
those kids out there. After they see me, when their mothers are feeding
them all that cashmere sweater and girdle ____ [expletive deleted by the New
York Times], maybe they’ll have a second thought—that they can be them-
selves and win.”122 If the groups didn’t manage, or for that matter, set out to
overthrow corporate America, they encouraged American youth to entertain
that second thought.
haight-ashbury was still an insider’s secret through much of 1966, but

January 1967’s Human Be-In solidified its reputation as the capital of
weirdness. An effort to unite Bay Area politicos and hippies, the Be-In drew
anywhere from ten to twenty thousand people and countless reporters. Al-
most all the San Francisco rock bands played and speakers included Allen
Ginsberg, who chanted, Lenore Kandel, who read from her recently cen-
sored poems, The Love Book, Timothy Leary, and Berkeley activist Jerry
Rubin. The Be-In was widely reported, and some, like longtime boho
clothes designer Linda Gravenites, think it marked a watershed, the mo-
ment when the Haight turned from a spontaneous expression of the coun-
terculture to a hyped-up caricature. By focusing exclusively on sex, drugs,
and rock ’n’ roll, the press, many say, pretty much determined what the na-
ture of the Haight would be. “Up until then people came because they were
full to overflowing, and were sharing their fullness,” Gravenites contends.
“After that, it was the empties who came, wanting to be filled.”123
Once the Haight was flooded with reporters and lost kids, the communi-
ty began unraveling. The Haight’s “renegades, outlaws, misfits, and drop-
outs” as photographer Bob Seidemann called them, made for a volatile
brew. “A cauldron,” he says, “that’s what this society was.”124 Moreover, the
Haight was an interracial neighborhood bordering the black Fillmore dis-
trict, and tension escalated as it filled up with middle-class young white
kids renouncing the nice homes, good schools, and well-paying jobs that
remained out of the reach of most blacks. Of course, drugs added to the
destabilization. Hippies defended marijuana and psychedelics as mind-ex-
panding “life” drugs, but mind-numbing “death” drugs, such as heroin,
speed, and barbiturates, were around the Haight from the beginning, too.125
Over time, the drug scene got uglier. As journalist Charles Perry points out,
the Haight taught many people, especially the Hell’s Angels, “that there was
a lot of money in the dope trade.”126 In fact, one reason good relations often
obtained between Angels and hippies was that the bikers were an important
drug connection, especially for grass and speed. Within a few years, the An-
gels forced many smaller dealers in the Haight out of business. In 1972, Cal-
ifornia’s attorney general concluded that the bikers were actually a huge
dope ring; the U.S. Customs Service guessed that the group had shipped
thirty-one million dollars worth of drugs to the East Coast since 1969.127
Ken Kesey had inaugurated the relationship between freaks and the An-
gels, perhaps in an effort to demonstrate the transformative power of acid,
or maybe just to out-hip everyone else. (“We’re in the same business,”
Kesey told the Angels. “You break people’s bones, I break people’s
heads.”)128 In any case, relations grew a lot cozier between freaks and An-
gels in Haight-Ashbury, with the Dead and Big Brother leading the way.
Janis Joplin insisted that the cover of Big Brother’s 1968 album Cheap Thrills
bear the Angels’ emblem and the words: “Approved by Hell’s Angels
Frisco.”129 The Angels dropped acid, but the counterculture’s faith that LSD
would transform them into cuddly teddy bears was, more often than not,
misplaced. Artist Jack Jackson recalls “biker guys taking acid and smashing
heads. It was like climbing in bed with Hitler.” Radical journalist Warren
Hinckle of Ramparts magazine cautioned that the Haight-Ashbury ethos of
dropping out, while fun, would “leave the driving to the Hell’s Angels.”130
But politico Hinckle wasn’t part of the counterculture, and at the time,
people on the inside who were troubled by the Angels were reluctant to
voice their concerns lest they be branded uptight and unhip. One defense
mounted on the Angels’ behalf was that the real villain was large-scale,
state-sponsored terror. Poet Michael McClure, for example, argued that
President Lyndon Johnson, who was escalating the war in Vietnam, was
more evil than a bunch of guys on bikes who express the violence that most
of us would rather deny.131 McClure and Diggers Peter Coyote and Emmet
Grogan hung out with the Angels and insisted that the bikers had to be
judged individually, not as a group.132 Yet the Angels, whatever their indi-
vidual talents, acted as a group. People were killed and women raped, all on
the orders of the club. “I can only believe it was the fascination the weak feel
for the strong,” suggests musician Bob Brown. “Maybe there was some
sense that the Establishment had their cops, their thugs, and now we had
ours.”133 Except that the Angels often behaved like thugs with hippies, too.
Bruce Barthol of Country Joe and the Fish remembers a gig where the An-
gels handled security. “Their method of clearing the stage was to push peo-
ple off it. One guy took a bottle and smashed a girl’s head with it.”134 De-
fended as outlaws, the Angels were conservative, even racist. But many of
the Haight’s musicians and freaks continued to consort with them even
after 1969’s Altamont rock festival where an Angel stabbed and stomped to
death a black man who had drawn a gun.
If the Be-In destabilized Haight-Ashbury, the Summer of Love sent it
reeling as many more “empties” flocked to the neighborhood. Rock music
didn’t make San Francisco, as the Jefferson Starship later boasted in “We
Built This City,” but rock did make it the capital of hipness. However, this
was an honor that veterans of the Haight would have gladly palmed off on
any other city during 1967’s disastrous Summer of Love. That spring, the
crowds in the Haight had grown so thick—and progressively thicker every
weekend—that people realized the neighborhood was on the cusp of a much
larger influx. The Diggers predicted a hundred thousand newcomers would
descend on the district that summer, and along with the Straight Theater,
the Oracle, and the Family Dog, they formed the Council for the Summer of
Love to organize celebratory events and serve as a liaison to the straight
world. The coming invasion of kids also prompted entrepreneurs to convert
anything and everything into Love Cafés and Love Burger stands. In a one-
month period, immediately after Monterey Pop, fifteen storefronts either
changed hands or changed their names to capitalize on the hippie craze.135
In April, the Gray Line Bus Company began its “Hippie Hop Tour,” adver-
tising it as “the only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United
States.”136 Pete Townshend of the Who visited the Haight around the time of
Monterey and was surprised and saddened by how thoroughly commercial-
ized the area had become.137
Increasingly, the crowds at the Fillmore and the Avalon neither knew or
cared about the origins of the scene. They cared only about the music. The
Red Dog Saloon and Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests were largely forgotten. Less than
two years after the original 1965 benefits, the Fillmore held another dance
for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. “Some of the musicians remembered us
from the old days,” said its founder Ronny Davis, “but the new rock fans . . .
knew the bands but not the Mime Troupe.” He tried addressing the audi-
ence, but “it was like speaking into a cotton candy machine.”138 By the Sum-
mer of Love, the scene had changed, growing, as Ken Kesey observed,
“tighter and stranger.”139
Seventy-five thousand kids spent their summer vacation in the Haight,
and by summer’s end, “Haight Street was lined with people with problems,”
wrote Village Voice reporter Don McNeil. “Behind the scenes, there were only
more problems.”140 The streets of the Haight were “griseous and filthy, psy-
chedelic weirdburger stands springing up in mutant profusion,” wrote Ed
Sanders in his book about Charles Manson. It was “like a valley of thousands
of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.”141 A community
that had relied upon long hair and weed as badges of authenticity and cool,
found itself vulnerable to the faux-hippie con artists flooding into the neigh-
borhood and other hip enclaves across America. “There was a six month pe-
riod,” recalled folksinger Arlo Guthrie, “when you could look down the street
and you could tell who was your friend and who wasn’t . . . You knew who had
a roach on him . . . but soon after you had guys who looked exactly like you
sellin’ you oregano.”142 Oregano was the least of it: bad drugs, stickups, rape,
and venereal disease were increasingly common in Haight-Ashbury. The
downward mobility of white hippies further fueled the neighborhood’s racial
tension. “You could see this animosity developing,” remembers Seidemann,
who thinks blacks’ anger toward white kids of the Haight was aggravated by
hippies’ deliberately mellow stance. “No matter how uptight and freaked
blacks got at the hippies, all they got back was, ‘Yeah, brother, peace, love,
shit, I can dig it, power to the people.’ So it was like yelling at silly putty.” Be-
fore long, “blacks began showing up on Haight Street and they weren’t look-
ing like Jimi Hendrix,” Seidemann says. “They were looking like bad guys.”143
And there were the cops, who increasingly made their presence felt in the
neighborhood. In early October they began making daily sweeps of Haight
Street to pick up runaways.144 Around the same time, the police busted the
Grateful Dead’s house on 710 Ashbury Street.145
Before long the old Haight habitués either fled or stayed indoors. “Uh oh,
the street people have become the house people,” Raechel Donahue, a KMPX
deejay, recalls her husband Tom saying.146 The Dead began moving away
soon after the bust. Even Janis Joplin, who had loved walking through the
neighborhood and hearing the whispers and shouts of recognition, found it
unlivable and moved out in early 1968. The Haight’s swift and precipitous
decline came as something of a shock. To many, the Summer of Love stood as

a cautionary tale about the perils of publicity and hype. In fact, in October
1967, some veteran freaks staged a “Death of the Hippie” ceremony. About
eighty people showed up for the event, where they urged people to move past
the media construction of the “hippie,” and become free men instead. How-
ever, skeptics charged that the protest reeked of “the same media crap as the
Be-In and the Summer of Love.”147 In the end, the story of Haight-Ashbury
demonstrated the wrongheadedness of Timothy Leary’s mantra, “turn on,
tune in, drop out.” Where had dropping out gotten the counterculture but the
blinding glare of the media, the reification of “hippie,” and the ruination of
the Haight? The limitations of the drop-out philosophy, especially in the
context of heightened police presence, broke down some of the countercul-
ture’s aversion to political protest. And the repression of hippie communi-
ties also led some politicos to reconsider their earlier dismissal of the
“hippy-dippy” counterculture. “A blending of pot and politics . . . a cross-
fertilization of the hippie and New Left philosophies,” was how leftists Abbie
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the other leaders of Yippie (Youth Interna-
tional Party) characterized their new group in late 1967.148
As the Haight lay in shambles its rock bands simply pulled up stakes and
escaped, usually to that “outpost of Nirvana,” Marin County.149 The grow-
ing gulf between musicians and the larger counterculture was illustrated by
conditions at Woodstock, the 1969 rock festival where the audience was
mired in the mud without adequate food while the stars, who stayed dry and
dined on steaks and champagne at the Holiday Inn and the Howard John-
son, were helicoptered in and out of the festival site. These stark differ-
ences spoke to the distance traveled in the two short years since Monterey
Pop, where the line separating performers from audience was still perme-
able. In the era’s lore, Woodstock has become synonymous with the “good
sixties,” with the beautiful people of the counterculture, while Altamont,
the Rolling Stone’s free concert just four months later, has come to stand
for the decade’s underside and the end of all that was hopeful in the hippie
subculture. A hastily thrown together open-air concert at a speedway on the
outskirts of San Francisco, Altamont reeked of bad vibes as the Angels,
who’d been hired to handle security, ran amuck, beating up people at
will.150 Altamont, which occurred fittingly in the last month of the decade,
came to symbolize the final gasp of the sixties, but it was Woodstock that put
an end to the era which had begun with the Family Dog dances and Mime
Troupe benefits.
The lesson of Woodstock for managers and musicians alike was the wis-
dom of playing one big gig rather than several smaller gigs; ironically, the
festival sounded the death knell for electric ballrooms, the cultural spaces
that had made Woodstock possible. “Before Woodstock the Jefferson Air-
plane still played four shows at the Fillmore East and earned $12,000,” re-
calls light show artist Joshua White. “Only really big acts—the Stones and the
Doors—played Madison Square Garden. After Woodstock many more played
the Garden. I knew—everybody on that stage at Woodstock knew—the future
wasn’t in rock theaters. The future was in arenas—big, spectacle shows—and
the musicians were going to start doing grander acts.” Six months after the
festival, White left his light show company to start a video projection busi-
ness. “One of the reasons I got hired was that the bands playing these are-
nas felt a little guilty. And so they would make up to their audience for play-
ing one show in a 20,000-seat arena by paying me $14,000 to project them
up on a giant 20’ by 30’ screen.”151 The new rock music was already a com-
modity before Woodstock, but the festival accelerated the process of com-
mercialism by suggesting to corporate executives how they could reap un-
told profits off of rock and the larger generation gap.
in woodstock’s aftermath, radical activist Todd Gitlin asked “whether

the youth culture will leave anything behind but a market.”152 His was a
question that even some San Francisco musicians may have asked them-
selves several years later when their careers were stalled and the ballrooms
that had nourished their music were shuttered, the victims of stadium rock.
Over time, there was no ignoring that the counterculture in many ways did
devolve into a market. Peter Coyote never repudiated his past, but he ad-
mitted that the Digger philosophy of life-acting “was diluted into the weak
tea of lifestyle,” which in turn “came to mean spend any way you choose.”153
And Carol Brightman, a political radical who came much later in life to an
appreciation of the counterculture, observed that the “formlessness and
chaos” of the ’60s led to a “new order,” not just in places like the Haight, but
in America’s corporate boardrooms as well.154 “All those basement leather
shops, hippie massage parlors, tie-dye vats—even Stewart Brand’s Whole
Earth Catalog—were seedbeds for growth industries to come.”155 One could
add to that list funky food co-ops, which paved the way for all those pricey
and profitable health food emporiums.156
But all sixties movements found their rebellion appropriated by capital-
ists on the lookout for new markets to exploit, new lifestyles to sell. To dis-
miss these movements because they proved evanescent or were partially ab-
sorbed by the dominant culture loses sight of the challenges they once
posed. Rock critic Simon Frith is critical of those gloomy, “told-you-so”
leftist accounts of youth culture’s co-optation. “The exhilaration, the sense
of change and purpose, the emotional underpinnings of the experience of
liberation are dismissed as fraudulent because of what happened next.”157
Moreover, what happened next was sometimes more than further commod-
ification. As he points out, the counterculture “survives in important inter-
stices of youth and leisure culture.” The process of recuperation is also hard
work, and doesn’t always succeed in stripping ideas entirely of their origi-
nal meaning. Judy Goldhaft of the Diggers points to the time that the line
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” which had appeared in a Dig-
ger broadside, showed up a year later in an ad for a San Francisco bank.
Even in the context of a bank ad, the idea still contained a transformative
truth, according to Goldhaft.158 Cultural critic Ellen Willis goes further, ar-
guing that leftist accounts that emphasize the “essential harmony” of corpo-
rate and countercultural interests fail to see that “cultural radicalism, with
its celebration of freedom and pleasure and its resistance to compulsive,
alienated work, is always a potential threat to the corporate system, howev-
er profitable its music, art and favored technological toys may be.”159
It was precisely the counterculture’s hedonism that troubled many
politicos. Being political didn’t preclude sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but it
sometimes did require subordinating the self to the larger cause, and this
was at odds with the “laissez-faire libertarianism” that prevailed in the
counterculture.160 This is an important difference, but it shouldn’t obscure
what the counterculture shared with the political movement: the same rest-
less and reckless energy that embraced life on the edge. Growing up in the
fifties starved for stimulation, connection, and meaning, activists and hip-
pies turned their backs on the cautious lives of their parents. Nothing de-
fines the generation that came of age in the sixties better than its determi-
nation to live outside the parameters of reasonable behavior, which, after
all, seemed at the very root of the problem, the cause of America’s terrible
adventure shortage. People in the counterculture may have had more fun in
their pursuit of intensity than those in politics, but they, too, tested them-
selves and risked their lives. Bob Seidemann admits to having had “fun and
a lot of laughs,” in the sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll world of Haight-Ash-
bury, but he insists, “It wasn’t a party. It was very intense and people were
dying among us and all around us. It was exciting to be there because you
were literally on the cutting edge, but you were the edge of the sword doing
the cutting. . . . We all laid our bodies on the line,” he ventures.161
“Put your body on the line” was a slogan sixties radicals often invoked to
inspire themselves and others to greater acts of resistance. “There’s a time
when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at
heart, that you can’t take part,” declared Mario Savio of Berkeley’s Free
Speech Movement in 1964. “And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears
and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got
to make it stop.”162 Hippies and activists often occupied different worlds but
they were all involved in high-risk experimentation, often with the self the
site of experimentation. To Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, whose Acid
Tests helped ignite the counterculture, the goal was simply “Furthur,” as
their Day-Glo bus proclaimed. Or as one survivor put it, “the feeling then
was, if you’ve got a light, burn it out.”163 As the war escalated and the repres-
sion of radicals intensified at home, the Movement moved “from protest to
resistance,” and in the process plenty of politicos ended up making bombs of
their lives. Huey Newton of the Black Panthers advocated “revolutionary sui-
cide” and Weatherman, an SDS splinter group, took up political terror.
Excess was part of the reckless, “superhypermost” sixties life, and some
people did succeed in extinguishing their light altogether.164 Certainly
drugs “cut a big swath” through the counterculture and the world of sixties
rock.165 Everyone knows the big names—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim
Morrison—but there were so many more losses, including those who ended
up in hospitals, halfway houses, or on the streets. Between 1965 and 1975
Peter Coyote lost eighteen friends, many of them to drugs and dope deals
gone sour. His fellow Digger Emmett Grogan’s OD in a subway car at the end
of the line in America’s first playground, Coney Island, seemed eerily ap-
propriate. Darby Slick had been among the first San Francisco rockers to
use heroin, and years later he’d write, “This was our Vietnam, the Battle of
the Brain Cells, and drugs were the weapons and the transport ships, the
airplanes, and people were the weapons too.”166 In 1977 novelist Philip K.
Dick, who had been addicted to amphetamines, wrote of drugs as a “dread-
ful war,” one whose losses he doubted the larger culture would ever fully
comprehend or acknowledge.167
The losses, especially because they’ve been condemned rather than un-
derstood or mourned, make it hard to claim the pleasure, the exhilaration,
and the revelations that can come from drugs and life lived close to the edge.
But, as Carol Brightman argues, to deny that pleasure erases a large chunk of
the sixties. She writes of biker-turned-drug-counselor Skip Workman’s re-
action upon seeing an old clip of Janis Joplin on TV. He had to fight the im-
pulse to get high because he was so overcome by “the music and the memo-
ries” as he watched her sing. “How are you going to tell the kids about that?”
he asks. “You can’t lie to ’em and say you didn’t have a good time.”168 Writer
Carl Gottlieb admits that some of his friends regret the take-it-to-the-limit
lives they led in the sixties, but he doesn’t share their regret. “If you sur-
vived, you had a chance to experience things at a level most people only
dream about,” he says. “I cherish those memories, and I know I put my life
in danger a few times.”169
Of course, excess did play a role in the unraveling of both these sixties
movements. Opposition to the country’s knee-jerk anticommunism led to a
foolhardy romanticizing of Third World revolutionary governments and
movements. Laissez-faire libertarianism sanctioned the use of all kinds of
drugs. The celebration of the outlaw encouraged the counterculture’s love
affair with the Angels and politicos’ blind veneration of the Black Panthers.
But I would argue that the excesses of the sixties functioned in a more in-
sidious fashion as well. The Viet Cong flags, the militant rhetoric, the turn
to violence, like the outrageous hair, clothes, drugs, and music, blinded
rebels and observers alike to the ways that both movements failed to break
through many of the conventions and customs of mainstream America. The
sheer outrageousness of hippies and radical activists masked how tied both
groups were to the dominant culture, particularly as regards gender and ho-
mosexuality. And by decade’s end, young women, inspired by the go-for-
broke risktaking and antiauthoritarianism of cultural and political radicals
but angry at the old-timey gender relations that prevailed in both groups,
would come together to form the sixties’ most far-reaching social move-
ment—women’s liberation.
2
The Ike Age: Rethinking the 1950s
“
T
eenagers are like airplanes,”
explained President Dwight Ei-
senhower, “you only hear about
the ones that crash.”1 Ike’s airplane analogy, designed to avert a national
panic about juvenile delinquency, may apply to decades, too. Certainly
America’s crash-and-burn decade, the sixties, continues to haunt us some
forty years later. The front burner issues of the last few years—welfare re-
form, abortion, affirmative action, gay and lesbian rights, and the so-called
culture wars—always manage to provoke yet another round of fighting about
those tumultuous years. So have Bill Clinton and his entire triangulated
presidency, particularly in the wake of Monicagate. Christian Coalition
founder Pat Robertson spoke for many on the Right when he excoriated
Clinton as “the poster child of the 1960s.”2 Clinton’s transgressions fall far
short of the prodigious proportions required of that era’s legendary poster
children—think Jimi Hendrix, Abbie Hoffman, and Janis Joplin. But despite
his fondness for Kenny G and his apparent reluctance to go all the way either
with a joint or Ms. Lewinsky, Clinton is indisputably a boomer.
Opportunistic politicians and finger-wagging political pundits aren’t the
only ones obsessed with the sixties.3 Each year has brought a new crop of
documentaries and memoirs that attempt to unravel the mysteries of that
decade. Even among tweedy historians, who usually believe that the dustier
the past the better, the sixties has overshadowed the fifties. Colleges rou-
tinely offer courses on the period, a distinction not bestowed on most other
This essay is a revised version of “Fiftiesomething,” which appeared in the

September 20, 1994, issue of the Village Voice.
decades—not the apparently dull and empty fifties, and certainly not the sev-
enties, that seemingly shallow decade of polyester, promiscuity, and disco.
However, the tide seems to be turning as some scholars have taken to ar-
guing against the idea that the sixties was an exceptional decade.4 Historian
Thomas Sugrue, for one, contends that we “misread other decades if we
focus on the sixties as this moment of rupture or apocalypse,” and proposes
that we study the postwar period as a whole.5 He argues, for example, that the
race riots of the ’60s grew out of job discrimination, housing practices, and
deindustrialization that date back to the forties and fifties. And others have
pointed out that the fifties was not exactly a time of cultural and political qui-
escence. After all, the fifties mark the beginning of meaningful dissent as
the civil rights movement (and rock ’n’ roll) took on the politics of Jim Crow,
and the Beats challenged the country’s craven materialism and its worship of
bureaucratic rationality.
Most of this revisionist history concerns the “Ike Age,” although con-
servative historian David Frum has recently argued that the seedbed of
much that’s wrong with the country—hedonism, the erosion of civility and
decline in literacy—was the 1970s, not the 1960s.6 Historians Casey Blake
and Ken Cmeil don’t share Frum’s right-wing politics, but they agree that
our lives today are more affected by the seventies than the sixties.7 As proof,
they point to such seventies phenomena as the growing cynicism about pub-
lic institutions, the emergence of postmodernism in the arts, homeless-
ness, the deinstitutionalization of mental patients, and the birth of both the
New Right and the gay rights movement. I would include disco, which de-
spite its low cultural standing helped give birth to today’s most popular
music—rap, house, electronica, and techno.
The shift away from sixties exceptionalism may seem like a recent
trend—the New York Times spotted it only last year—but for some time now
scholars have been questioning the tendency to treat the period as though it
were utterly anomalous and disconnected from the fifties. In fact, the first
studies to chip away at the foundation of sixties exceptionalism appeared in
the mid-eighties, almost ten years before the publication of David Halber-
stam’s best-selling tome The Fifties and that other great cultural marker—
The Gap’s rehabilitation of khaki.8
What follows is my ambivalent reaction to this revisionist literature.
Much of this work effectively debunks the idea that the fifties can be sum-
The Ike Age: Rethinking the 1950s 53
marily dismissed as America’s “Dark Ages,” a wasteland of hula hoops,

panty raids, and poodle skirts. However, it sometimes overstates the ex-
tent of continuity across decades. Take the case of Janis Joplin. She might
have ended up the Port Arthur schoolteacher of her mother’s dreams had
the Beats and the folk revival of the fifties not held out other possibilities,
but her unlikely success, her transformation from misfit rebel to rock su-
perstar, speaks volumes about the seismic changes that rocked America in
the 1960s.
sociologist aldon morris was among the first to challenge the idea that
the sixties began on February 1, 1960, at the Woolworth’s counter in Greens-
boro, North Carolina. Morris’s 1984 book, The Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement, argued that the movement was not a spontaneous eruption, but
rather the result of determined organizing stretching back to the late for-
ties. Even Rosa Parks, whose defiance of Jim Crow laws sparked the Mont-
gomery bus boycott, was an experienced NAACP activist, and not, as legend
has it, some “quiet, dignified older lady” who’d simply “had enough.”9
Likewise, John D’Emilio’s 1983 monograph, Sexual Politics, Sexual Commu-
nities revealed the ways that fifties homophile activists paved the way for
the gay and lesbian liberationists of the ’70s, though he was careful to
admit the “glaring and undeniable” differences between pre- and post-
Stonewall activists.10
In the prodigiously researched If I Had a Hammer, Maurice Isserman lo-
cates the organizational and intellectual roots of the New Left in Max
Schachtman’s Young People’s Socialist League, the crowd at Irving Howe’s
journal Dissent, and the radical-pacifist groups led by A. J. Muste. Isserman
goes so far as to contend that the New Left emerged from the old left “in
ways that made it difficult to perceive exactly where the one ended and the
other began.”11 Isserman has unearthed a fascinating range of left activism
and writing in these years. As James Miller and Todd Gitlin have argued,
some of the ideas put forward by the New Left were first advanced by C.
Wright Mills, Dwight MacDonald, and Paul Goodman. But most old leftists
had limited appeal to new leftists chasing a political high. Who needed the
Dissent crowd’s tired defeatism masquerading as sober realism, or their
knee-jerk anticommunism? Although the rift between the old and new left
widened considerably during the decade, substantial differences existed
from the beginning. There’s no better example than the tensions between
the sixties’ leading New Left group, Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), and its parent organization, the economistic League for Industrial
Democracy (LID), which are ably documented by Isserman. The fact that the
LID board paid no attention to the “values” section of SDS’s 1962 Port
Huron Statement—the meat of the document, at least in author Tom Hay-
den’s view—suggests the magnitude of the generational divide. To SDSers
like Gitlin, LID was nothing more than a “musty relic of a bygone past.” In
fact, SDSers took to calling their parent group the lid.12
Isserman’s own evidence suggests that old leftists failed in their efforts
to clone themselves, or even to influence appreciably the new generation of
activists. Indeed, the old left’s most lasting contribution to the New Left was
probably negative. The old left’s rigid anticommunism put SDS on a “polit-
ical trajectory leading first toward anti-anti-communism,” writes Isser-
man, “and then onward toward an identification with Third World Commu-
nist movements and governments.”13 Isserman is understandably critical of
this development, but he fails to adequately acknowledge the extent to
which anticommunism had become, as Alan Wald argues, “an ideological
mask for discrediting movements for radical social change and supporting
the status quo.”14
Just as Isserman looked for the connections between old and new left-
ists, so have feminist scholars searched for the roots of second-wave femi-
nism in organizations like the stubbornly elitist National Women’s Party
and the early sixties pacifist group, Women Strike for Peace. In Survival in
the Doldrums, historian Leila Rupp and sociologist Verta Taylor argue for the
connection between famous suffragist Alice Paul’s organization, the Na-
tional Women’s Party, and the women’s liberation movement that arose in
the late sixties. As evidence, Rupp and Taylor point to second-wave femi-
nists’ enthusiastic support for the Equal Rights Amendment, which the
NWP had been fighting for since the 1920s.15 Although the liberal feminists
of NOW did come to embrace the ERA once unionists were won over, many
younger women, especially radical and socialist feminists, initially opposed
the reform. Rather than reform a social order built on racial, class, and gen-
der inequality, rather than seek an equal piece of an inherently unequal pie,
feminists, they argued, ought to dismantle the system altogether. In fact,
some women’s liberationists went so far as to denounce woman suffrage,
which had been won in 1920, as a “sop” for women, designed to buy them off
and shut them up. The women of the NWP were appalled by younger femi-
nists’ breezy dismissal of suffrage. And they were mystified by younger
women’s concern with private life, especially their preoccupation with sex-
ual pleasure. How could orgasms possibly matter as much as the ERA?
The NWP was not particularly effective in the years before feminism’s
revival, but the same wasn’t true of Women Strike for Peace. Historian Amy
Swerdlow argues that WSP not only nudged public opinion in favor of 1963’s
partial test ban treaty, but also inflicted permanent damage on the Red
hunters of HUAC.16 Most of the women in WSP had been liberals, radicals,
or pacifists in the 1940s, but they crafted a very different image: apolitical
housewives. Trading on their image as concerned mothers, the group not
only pulled off the largest national women’s peace protest of the twentieth
century, involving 50,000 women in sixty communities, they also made a
brilliant end run around the anti-Communism and the antifeminism of the
period. WSP mainstreamed pacifism so successfully that within a year of its
November 1961 demonstration the House Committee on Un-American Ac-
tivities (HUAC) decided to investigate the organization for possible Com-
munist infiltration. From the very first day of the hearings, however, the
mild-mannered, well-dressed women of WSP had the Congressmen wish-
ing they had left the group alone. With the committee solemnly asking wit-
nesses questions like, “Did you wear a colored paper daisy to identify your-
self as a member of the Women Strike for Peace?” HUAC became a joke.
Asked if she would permit Communists in the group, WSPer Dagmar Wilson
giggled and explained she had no control over who joined their demonstra-
tions, but added, “I would like to say that unless everybody in the whole
world joins us in this fight, then God help us.” Confounded by WSP’s stud-
ied guilelessness and unassailable motherist politics, HUAC emerged from
the hearing looking, to columnist Russell Baker, “less like dashing Red-
hunters than like men trapped in a bargain basement on a sale day.”
Swerdlow argues convincingly that the WSP’s strategic structurelessness
and its rejection of the knee-jerk anti-Communism so typical of the non-
Communist left prefigured the political culture of the New Left. However,
less persuasive is her contention that in their deployment of femininity the
maternalist pacifists of WSP foreshadowed feminism. In fact, younger
women’s liberationists were intolerant of the WSP’s selfless moral mother
politics, especially its privileging of the Vietnam war over women’s issues.
After all, this was several years before “difference feminism” became the
vogue. For their part, WSPers were outraged by the younger women’s efforts
to put sexism “on a par with social issues such as war, poverty, and racism.”
Neither Swerdlow nor Rupp and Taylor upend the usual interpretation of
the fifties as a dark time for women, but that’s what Joanne Meyerowitz sets
out to do in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–
1960. Meyerowitz organized this lively anthology around the idea that most
women’s historians, misled by their “unrelenting focus on female subordi-
nation” and their obliviousness to women who weren’t white and middle-
class, got the fifties all wrong.17 In her own contribution, Meyerowitz
demonstrates that the feminine mystique was not nearly as pervasive as
previously imagined. Popular magazines geared to African Americans, she
argues, often encouraged women’s independence and professional aspira-
tions. But too often this volume tries to displace the “domestic stereotype”
and complicate the fifties by presenting us with stories of women who
weren’t June—Communist Party members, Mexican-American community
activists, and those protesting air raid drills and nuclear “preparedness.”18
After all, the idea that the “feminine mystique” was more prescriptive than
descriptive is hardly new; ideology always falls short of its mark. The issue
is that women were generally expected to embrace domesticity. Although
there are exceptions (Wini Breines, Ruth Feldstein, Donna Penn, Rickie
Solinger, and Meyerowitz herself), too many of the essayists here mistake
the fissures of the fifties for the outright rebellion of the sixties. One con-
tributor even claims that her research on civil defense protests proves that
McCarthyism and the feminine mystique were desperate and failed at-
tempts to “stave off a massive revolt against the Cold War state and the older
gender roles.” In fact, she continues, “it now seems evident that ‘The Six-
ties’ actually began in the middle of the 1950s.”19
Anyone who thinks the fifties lasted five years should read Hettie Jones
and Sally Belfrage. In her wonderfully evocative memoir, Unamerican Activ-
ities, Belfrage recounts her 1954 campaign to remake herself into an “AAG,”
or all-American girl.20 Daughter of leftist journalist Cedric Belfrage whose
deportation to Britain under the McCarran-Walter Act made headlines,
Belfrage struggled to make herself invisible by doing “all the regulation
things, wear spike rollers to bed, stuff tissues down my bra, starve.” She re-
calls not knowing “which is the tightest, my panty girdle, my cinch belt, my
pointy heels, or that smile fixed to my face to disguise all the pain.”21
Talk about a culture of constraints! Even the red diaper babies she met
were “goody-goody . . . naturals at the jargon . . . and up on all ten stanzas to
the Red version of “Green Grow the Rushes-Ho.”22 Belfrage rebelled by get-
ting pinned to a West Point cadet who years later became one of the archi-
tects of Star Wars. She didn’t turn patriotic; her father’s incarceration and
deportation (“This is interesting. No evidence, no charge, no bail.”23)
wouldn’t permit that. Although her days as an AAG were shortlived (she
soon got involved in the civil rights movement), Belfrage didn’t feel much
affinity for her father’s bohemian Village friends who all seemed “oddball
in the same way.” The mothers all “wear leotards and Capezios, black or
beige, with natural leather bags and sandals, their hair straight and long and
smoothed into buns and ponytails, and no lipstick, only mascara.”24
Belfrage forgot about the tights, which Hettie Jones lists as a crucial
Beat-girl accessory in How I Became Hettie Jones. New York’s bohemian
scene provided a refuge of sorts for an outsider like Jones, who as a college
student had felt like a “mutation” and yearned to “become something”—an
ambition that led her to Greenwich Village where she met and married
Amiri Baraka (né Leroi Jones).25 Although Jones thought the Beats “looked
okay,” neither she nor her husband had the “B-movie graininess, saintly
disaffection,” or the “wild head of hair” required to be truly Beat.26 More-
over, she was a girl in a rebel world where that great enemy of bohemia, con-
ventionality, was inscribed as feminine, and where marriage, like every-
where else in postwar America, resulted in the man being “augmented” and
the woman diminished.27
Containment defined postwar America, as these memoirs by Belfrage
and Jones demonstrate. Historian Elaine Tyler May makes this point as well
in Homeward Bound.28 Although the U.S. wasn’t facing anything like a mas-
sive revolt, entrenched interests wanted to check the power of certain
groups. In these years the country was structured around controlling black
veterans, unionists, women, and gays, all of whom were emboldened in var-
ious ways by the wartime mobilization. The containment of women followed
from the disruptiveness of the Great Depression and World War II. In the
waning days of the war, the media was obsessed with whether women would
cooperate with the national interest and go back to being mothers and
wives. As anthropologist Margaret Mead noted, this “continuous harping”

on women’s domesticity reflected deep-seated anxieties.29 The Cold War
intensified these anxieties by making family stability and traditional gender
roles critical to the war against communism. Labor’s containment is among
the more dramatic stories of postwar America. Had Operation Dixie, the
CIO’s abortive attempt to organize the South succeeded, unionism could
have grown into a national movement rather than remaining a regional—
and crushable—movement. Racism played a critical role in its defeat, as it
did in the gradual unraveling of the New Deal coalition, a development
which is usually laid at the doorstep of the sixties. Recent work by Thomas
Sugrue shows Franklin Roosevelt’s coalition coming apart as early as the
late ’40s, when fair-housing policies in Northern cities provoked a grass-
roots rebellion against liberalism among the urban white working class, the
very backbone of the coalition.30
Just as there emerged in the postwar years a newly assertive working-
class whiteness committed to residential segregation, white youth—irre-
spective of class—were violating America’s racial line by going to rock ’n’
roll shows. George Lipsitz connects the development of rock ’n’ roll to
World War II, which brought large numbers of white and black Southern-
ers to industrial cities. In his view, extreme overcrowding broke down res-
idential segregation and made for unprecedented cultural exchanges
across the color line. The war also gave migrants greater purchasing
power, a fact not lost on small-time entrepreneurs, who began meeting
the newcomers’ demand for country, blues, and R&B records. In the after-
math of World War II, over four hundred record companies were formed.
Radio stations, hungry to attract listeners now that many of their most
popular programs had moved to TV, began trying to attract specific listen-
ing groups, including blacks. Alan Freed was just one of many deejays who
noticed that white kids were tuning into stations playing rhythm and
blues. Lipsitz ties white kids’ fascination with early rock ’n’ roll—and the
truck drivers, dishwashers, and factory workers who became its first
stars—to their discontent with the newly formed white-bread suburbs in
which they found themselves marooned. White youth, he contends, were
drawn to the “cultures of the dying industrial city” because they longed for
a “connection to the past, for emotional expression, and a set of values that
explained and justified rebellion.”31
By the mid-’60s the tensions and contradictions of the postwar period

could no longer be contained. White middle-class youth fled suburbia for
the cities, often the inner cities that their parents had escaped in the great
postwar migration to the suburbs. Fearful of ever becoming Jim Bakkus or
June Cleaver many young people avoided settling down at all costs. White,
middle-class kids’ restlessness and their search for meaning and stimula-
tion was a reaction to their parents’ preoccupation with comfort and secu-
rity—itself a response to the uncertainties and insecurities of the Depres-
sion and war years. Efforts to make up for the blandness of suburban life,
the dearth of stimulation, helped provoke the risk-taking of baby boomers
eager to experiment with sex, drugs, new sounds, and something other than
Cold Warrior-style politics. While the sixties may have been a revolt against
mindless consumption, sixties hedonism was very much the product of
postwar consumer capitalism and its promotion of uninhibited pleasure.32
It didn’t take much to get from advertising slogans that promised “satisfac-
tion guaranteed” to the Rolling Stones’ incendiary 1965 number one hit, “I
Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” which inveighed against the false promises of
consumer capitalism, but from a position of lustful hedonism. Finally, as
Wini Breines demonstrated in Young, White, and Miserable, the contradic-
tion between the feminine mystique and the emancipatory possibilities of
the fifties (higher education, more democratic marriages, paid work, and
better sex) created “dry tinder” for the spark of women’s liberation.33
And then there was television, the much-maligned boob tube, which
brought the civil rights movement into practically every American home. In
his vivid memoir, Colored People, Henry Louis Gates remembers watching
the 1957 battle to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. “All the
colored people in America watched together, with one set of eyes. We’d
watch it in the morning, on the Today show; we’d watch it in the evening, on
the news.”34 TV revealed the viciousness of Jim Crow and the audacious
bravery of those whose eyes were on the prize. Writer Dorothy Allison felt
“awed” by this movement, which seemed to offer the possibility of “free-
dom for all of us.”35 Even the rhetoric of the Cold War with those predic-
table buzzwords “democracy,” “freedom,” and “self-determination,” could
encourage a critical consciousness in the context of high-power hoses and
police dogs.36 “There’s a town in Mississippi called Liberty. There’s a de-
partment in Washington called Justice,” read the sign in one Mississippi
civil rights office during 1964’s Freedom Summer.37 The government fi-
nally moved against segregation in large measure because the necessities of
the Cold War required it. If the U.S. was going to prove the virtues of
democracy and capitalism over Communism, especially in its struggle with
Russia to win the Third World, it was going to have to dismantle segregation
and close the credibility gap with regard to America’s commitment to free-
dom and democracy.
Despite all these contradictions, the spirit of the fifties proved remark-
ably tenacious. In early 1963, before Kennedy’s assassination, the escala-
tion of the Vietnam War, and the British Invasion that the Beatles spear-
headed, there was little hint of the unrest to come. Culturally, the country
still felt and looked crew-cut conservative. Of course, once the country un-
raveled, it did so with dizzying speed, and America, which had seemed, in
Allen Ginsberg’s words, “as solid as the Empire State Building,” turned out
to be less solid than almost anyone had imagined.38 But fissures are not
tremors, which is to say that although the fifties gave rise to the sixties in all
sorts of unexpected ways, the fifties weren’t the sixties. No amount of revi-
sionism will change that.
3
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”:
N
o period in recent u.s. history
stands in greater contrast to the
present, or seems to have held
more possibilities for radical transformation, than the sixties. This is no
doubt why the sixties remains the site of intense ideological contestation
more than thirty years after it all began. While liberals have typically react-
ed to the sixties as an enormous embarrassment, conservatives have used
the period to great political effect, deploying a version of the sixties that
emphasizes disorder, permissiveness, and black as well as female assertive-
ness in such a way that accelerating poverty, crime, drug use, and even AIDS
can be laid at the decade’s doorstep. The right’s vilification of the period
has, of course, served the strategic function of obscuring the connection be-
tween the aforementioned social ills and the policies of the Reagan and
Bush administrations.
But if the right’s version of the sixties has prevailed in the realm of for-
mal politics, it has been a different story in the cultural and intellectual are-
nas of American life. Here we find rap musicians like Public Enemy dis-
rupting the mainstream construction of the black freedom movement as a
“friendly crusade for racial integration” by claiming for Malcolm X a criti-
cal role in that struggle.1 Documentary films such as Berkeley in the Sixties,
and two television series, Eyes on the Prize and Making Sense of the Sixties,
chronicle the achievements (and, to a lesser extent, the missteps) of various
sixties movements in a largely unrepentant manner.
This essay is reprinted with revisions from an article of the same title in
Socialist Review 22, no. 2 (1992): 9–34, by permission of the Socialist Review.
Predictably, Hollywood’s record is more mixed. But certainly Oliver

Stone, who has directed four films on various aspects of the sixties (Platoon,
The Doors, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK), has offered audiences cynical
appraisals of the government and sympathetic depictions of the antiwar and
youth movements. Finally, within publishing the sixties has become a kind
of growth industry as intellectuals and former activists have produced a host
of memoirs, histories, and anthologies, most of which affirm the democrat-
ic and egalitarian vision of the sixties movements.
However, women often play a larger role in the conservatives’ demoniz-
ing scripts of the sixties—predictably, as welfare cheats or selfish femi-
nists—than in progressive accounts of the period. Most egregious of all are
Oliver Stone’s sixties films, in which citizenship, principled protest, and
rock ’n’ roll genius are assumed to be the unique preserve of men.2 Stone’s
masculinist formulations of the period are particularly disturbing because
he has become a kind of de facto historian of the sixties.3 But even Eyes on
the Prize, which in many ways is a model of documentary filmmaking, de-
votes little attention to the pivotal role of women in the civil rights move-
ment or to that critical figure, Ella Baker. Especially troubling to me as a
historian of the women’s liberation movement is that virtually all recently
published books about the sixties fail to effectively integrate that movement
into their reconstructions of the period.4 In fact, much of this work repli-
cates the position of women in the male-dominated Movement—that is, the
women’s liberation movement remains on the periphery, far from the core
of the narrative. Curiously, through their narrative containment of women
these writers have managed to marginalize women more effectively than
could the movements they write about, because, of course, women did suc-
ceed in taking center stage by the end of the decade.
In this essay I criticize how “the sixties” has been mapped in the many
books that purport to tell its story, and I offer some thoughts on how we
might remap it. My criticisms will center not only on the failure to embed
women and the women’s liberation movement within the history of the six-
ties, but also on the failure to engender the New Left—the focus, after all, of
most of these sixties books. The remapping I envision would make the
women’s liberation movement an integral part of the sixties by demonstrat-
ing its considerable philosophical connections to the New Left and the
black freedom movement—without, of course, denying its originality. This
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” 63
remapping should be understood as a political intervention, one that seeks

to disrupt the accepted version of the sixties, which too often depicts the
women’s liberation movement and the New Left, in particular, as philo-
sophically opposed. I am concerned that people understand that conflicts
between the New Left and the women’s liberation movement were a conse-
quence of specific historical circumstances and not, as most sixties books
(and many feminist accounts) would have it, the result of some inevitable
and chronic antagonism—an interpretation that makes all feminist and left
collaborations seem doomed. In this sense, the revisioning I call for shares
much with Ellen DuBois’s recent work challenging the idea that in the early
twentieth century the woman suffrage movement and socialism were fun-
damentally and irreconcilably antagonistic.5
My remapping also involves locating sixties radicalism in the postwar
period and exploring the ways that both the white New Left and the white
women’s liberation movement represented a rebellion against the domi-
nant gender constructions of the ultradomestic fifties.6 I contend that fu-
ture studies would benefit from exploring the contested terrain of mas-
culinity in postwar America and its relation to sixties radicalism. I suggest
that counterhegemonic constructions of masculinity, especially those ad-
vanced by Beats and rock ’n’ rollers, may not only have inspired white male
new leftists but, in their appropriation of a “black” style, may also have
helped destabilize racial boundaries in the United States.
the marginalization of the women’s liberation movement in sixties

books has several sources, but it has been facilitated by the scarcity of mem-
oirs or autobiographies by women’s liberation activists. While it sometimes
seems as if every male leader of Students for a Democratic Society has either
written a memoir or is in the process of writing one (the latest being Mark
Rudd), only Mary King, Angela Davis, and Jane Alpert have published book-
length memoirs about their movement experiences. Moreover, neither King
nor Davis was active in the women’s liberation movement, while Alpert, as a
cultural feminist, presents her conversion to feminism as following from her
rejection of the left.7 (It is also distressing that there have been few recent
autobiographies by African-American men or women active in the radical
black freedom struggle. James Forman’s, Cleveland Sellers’s and Anne
Moody’s compelling memoirs are more than twenty years old.8)
Not unrelated to this fact is that books by white male new leftists stand
as representative of “the sixties.” Their experiences are presented as uni-
versal, as defining the era, whereas the experiences of women and people of
color (two overlapping categories, of course) are constructed as particular-
istic. There is a depressingly familiar metonymy at work here. For instance,
Todd Gitlin’s and Tom Hayden’s books claim to be about “the sixties,” and
despite the incompleteness of their accounts most reviewers have agreed.
Yet had Carlos Muñoz, the author of Youth Identity, Power: The Chicano Move-
ment, used “The Sixties” as the subtitle of his book and still focused prima-
rily on Chicanos, as Gitlin and Hayden do on white men, most reviewers
would have thought it odd at the very least.9
I suspect the textual subordination of women’s liberation also reflects a
certain reluctance to part with what has become the conventional sixties
story line whereby radicalism emerges on February 1, 1960, with the Greens-
boro lunch-counter sit-in, and ends with the February 1970 Greenwich Vil-
lage townhouse explosion or the Kent State killings later that year. If one’s
narrative is conceptualized around the idea that radicalism was simply
played out by the decade’s end, then there really is only token narrative space
available for women’s liberation (or for the Chicano, Native American, or gay
and lesbian movements). Thus, most sixties books, while they do note the
problem of sexism on the left and acknowledge the considerable achieve-
ments of the women’s liberation movement, fail to provide any substantive
discussion of that movement, including the ways in which it carried on and
extended the radicalism of the era. The film Berkeley in the Sixties, for in-
stance, devotes astonishingly little time to the women’s liberation move-
ment. Indeed, by ignoring or downplaying the connections between the
women’s liberation movement and the New Left and the black freedom
movements, these accounts create the impression that the women’s libera-
tion movement was a breed apart.
But if women’s liberation generally constitutes an interruption in the
narrative flow, it is nonetheless presented as a significant interlude in two
very important retrospectives of the sixties, Todd Gitlin’s often brilliant The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Tom Hayden’s wonderfully evocative
Reunion: A Memoir.10 In both books women’s liberation is associated with
the male-dominated Movement’s unraveling and with each man’s personal
pain and turmoil.11 In his brief chapter on women’s liberation, for example,
Gitlin analyzes with great perceptiveness the emotional divide separating

left men and women in the late sixties. He observes that men who were not
a part of hardline sects “were miserable with the crumbling of their onetime
movement, [while] women were riding high.” But he doesn’t discuss the
source of women’s “high” in any depth. In fact, while his discussions of the
New Left are marked by analytic rigor, his observations about the women’s
liberation movement are glib, if not diminishing—as in “there were a myr-
iad of ways to be ‘in the movement,’ from sexual experimentation as ‘polit-
ical lesbians’ . . . to journal-keeping à la Anais Nin.”12 (Of course, as anyone
with even the most glancing knowledge of lesbian feminism knows, sexual
experimentation was not exactly its driving force.) After this obligatory
chapter on the women’s liberation movement, Gitlin returns to the tale of
the left’s continued collapse and his own personal pain, much of it appar-
ently caused by the women’s movement.
Tom Hayden, too, associates women’s liberation with the fragmentation
of sixties radicalism. In fact, Hayden characterizes the period when black
power and women’s liberation were in ascent as a “Dostoyevskian night-
mare.”13 For him, feminism’s rise (and black power’s as well) is insepara-
ble from the disintegration of the “beloved community” and his own per-
sonal anguish. The lengthiest passage on the women’s movement concerns
the men’s consciousness-raising group to which Hayden belonged and what
he calls the “torture sessions” he and the others endured in an effort to
undo their sexism.14 (Although both Hayden and Gitlin were living in the
Bay Area at the time, they apparently were not in the same group, since
Gitlin remembers his men’s group degenerating into gripe sessions about
women rather than attacks on male members.)15
It is true that the emergence of the women’s liberation movement coin-
cided with the disintegration of much of the New Left and SDS in particular.
I would go even further and suggest that the rise of women’s liberation is re-
lated to the collapse of the left as a national movement. The New Left’s re-
pudiation of prefigurative politics, which had emphasized creating in the
present the desired community of the future, and its reversion to a tired old
left politic not only guaranteed its irrelevance to most people in the United
States but also contributed to the development of feminist consciousness.16
But that isn’t the point either of these authors are making. For Hayden and
Gitlin (although Gitlin is more self-reflexive), women’s liberation is the
final nail in the coffin of the “beloved community” and it is remembered

with sadness and not a little petulance. This attitude plays a role, I believe,
in the diminished narrative status accorded the women’s liberation move-
ment in sixties books.
As Wini Breines has pointed out, a lot of sixties books (including these
two) dichotomize the era into the “good” and “bad” sixties.17 In the case of
SDS, of course, it seems justified: After all, SDS did self-destruct in a spec-
tacularly awful way. But this demonizing of the late sixties confuses SDS
with all of sixties radicalism, which was recombining in some interesting
and constructive ways at that time, as the case of women’s liberation dem-
onstrates.18 My point is that when the sixties is recast so that the New Left no
longer occupies the privileged narrative core, the record of the late sixties is
somewhat more mixed than the reigning interpretation of destructive dis-
integration would suggest.19
This formulation of the “good” and “bad” sixties has something to do
with the writers’ own positions as SDS “heavies”—the sixties equivalents of
what Josephine Herbst derisively termed “the head boys” to describe the
male luminaries of the thirties literary left.20 This conflation of the sixties
and SDS confuses the fortunes of the Movement with these writers’ own sta-
tus, which, as Breines points out, was in serious decline by the late sixties.
Inattention to their own circumstances is a factor as well in Gitlin and Hay-
den’s failure to explore the ways in which the New Left was gendered, and in
particular how masculinity was constructed in SDS. No one, with the excep-
tion of Barbara Epstein, has really grappled with SDS’s androcentrism, ex-
cept perhaps to suggest that it reflected the chasm separating the New from
the old left, which, it is explained, at least acknowledged male chauvinism
as a problem.21 It is as though SDS’s androcentrism requires acknowledg-
ment and a few mea culpas, but no serious engagement.
My reading of the New Left suggests that while it failed to problematize
gender inequality, it did call into question at least some of the prevailing
cultural assumptions about masculinity. Indeed, I see the androcentrism of
the New Left as, in part, a response to the domesticated, attenuated sort of
masculinity critiqued by William Whyte in his book The Organization Man.
Anxiety about masculinity was not confined to new leftists. Pop culture
abounded with images of “small dads.” Social critics expounded on the dan-
gers of the Organization Man and the “other-directed personality,” at-

tributing this new and untraditional form of masculinity to the expanding
white-collar, corporate work world and sometimes to suburban matriarchs
as well.22 (As an aside, it’s interesting how fears of emasculation figure in
the radicalism of both the sixties and the thirties. While sixties white male
radicals were rebelling against a spiritually depleted masculinity, male lit-
erary radicals in the thirties were outraged by the way in which masculinity
had become physically depleted. As Paula Rabinowitz points out, the image
of the male body diminished by hunger and unemployment was central to
the radical iconography of the thirties.)23
By advancing an untamed masculinity, one that took risks and dared to
gamble, the New Left was in some sense promoting a counterhegemonic
(though not feminist) understanding of masculinity.24 I suspect male new
leftists’ admiration for the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills had as much
to do with his leather jacket and BMW motorcycle and their evocation of an
unfettered, unmanaged masculinity as it did with his excoriation of the
white-collar world and his trenchant critiques of functionalism and anti-
communism.25 Similarly, this factor may explain why what Maurice Isser-
man has called the “tired heroism” of those old leftists associated with the
journal Dissent had so little appeal to most new leftists.26 Gitlin notes Mills’s
maverick appeal and mentions in passing that Hayden’s master’s thesis on
Mills was subtitled “Radical Nomad.”27 Hayden notes that his own father
seemed the embodiment of Mills’s white-collar worker.28 But neither of
them (nor James Miller, who spends considerable time on Mills in his book
Democracy Is in the Streets) discusses the relation of Mills and masculinity to
the politics they themselves forged and the lives they led.
The dissatisfaction of white New Left men with domesticated masculin-
ity led them to identify with those on the margins of white U.S. culture, par-
ticularly African-American men, or what they imagined them to be.29 Todd
Gitlin has written that in spheres of both music and justice, “white Ameri-
ca was drawing its juice from blacks.”30 But for white male radicals (and
perhaps others too) the attraction went well beyond music and justice to in-
clude masculinity and sexuality. White leftist men’s admiration of African-
American men seems related to their romanticized view of these men as un-
encumbered by domestic constraints and therefore somehow more
authentically masculine. This dynamic was at work in community-organiz-

ing projects such as SDS’s Economic Research and Action Projects (ERAP),
where white New Left men tried to cop a “black” or a white Appalachian
style, depending upon the neighborhood.
Writing in 1970, Gitlin observed that ERAPers like himself romanti-
cized the poor, whom they saw as “involuntarily insulated from the tread-
mill consumerism of the middle classes from which the organizers had
come.”31 But while most ERAPers shared an antimaterialist stance and a
desire to transcend their class through downward mobility, the very dif-
ferent responses of New Left men and women to the poor communities
they entered suggest that these communities may have held different at-
tractions for men than for women. According to Sara Evans’s Personal Pol-
itics, former ERAPers agree that New Left women made significant
progress in organizing poor women, while their male counterparts made
little headway because they spent most of their time hanging out in bars
and on street corners trying to emulate (or compete with) the most mar-
ginal men in the community. While ERAP women were attracted to the
self-sufficiency and assertiveness of neighborhood women, the men were
often drawn to the renegade and antidomestic masculinity of the most
marginal men. Rennie Davis recalls that in order to be accepted by the
gang in his neighborhood, he spent his whole first week drunk and, in
what must have been one especially drunken moment, boasted that he
would “beat every mean son of a bitch” in the local bar.32 Steve Max re-
members the ideologically inclined men “always kind of hanging back . . .
trying to develop southern accents.”33
Sara Evans has suggested that the macho posturing of ERAP men was
compensatory. She contends that “their commitment to the movement and
their identification with the very poor required a break with the traditional
avenues of success—money, prestigious jobs, respectability.” Denied these
avenues for “proving their ‘manhood,”’ they turned to the avenues provid-
ed by community organizing, including sexual conquest.34 But it strikes me
that this “break” Evans speaks of was fundamental rather than incidental to
their radicalism. While they were undoubtedly committed to the poor and to
the Movement, they were also committed to seeking alternatives to the pre-
vailing model of masculinity in which men were ostensibly prisoners of
their wives, their jobs, and the American Dream of achieving the good life
through consumption.
if new left men have produced a problematic rendering of the sixties, so

have women’s liberationists. Feminist recollections often formulate the re-
lationship between the women’s liberation movement and the larger Move-
ment in entirely negative terms. Although there are exceptions, what
emerges from many feminist recollections, especially from about 1973 on-
ward, is not the way in which the Movement empowered women (however
unintentionally) but the ways in which it exploited them.35 The idea that
women might have learned anything from their Movement experience—ex-
cept, of course, a well-developed cynicism about leftist men—is disallowed.
In many such accounts New Left men appear as possibly even more cretinous
and patriarchal than the men they sought to supplant. For example, Robin
Morgan, editor of the best-selling anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (and a re-
cent editor of Ms. magazine), denounced the “ejaculatory politics” of the New
Left.36 And Andrea Dworkin has written that what distinguished New Left
men from others was that they “wanted to wield penises, not guns, as em-
blems of manhood.”37
Although I disagree with these assessments, feminist cynicism was not
unwarranted. The male-dominated New Left was almost willfully blind to
sexism. After all, this was a movement where slogans like “Girls Say Yes to
Guys Who Say No” went uncontested.38 This was a movement where some
men reportedly said “the movement hangs together on the head of a
penis.”39 In other words, this was a movement where gender inequality was
seen, just as in the larger culture, as unremarkable. As feminists pointed
out at the time, in this respect the Movement mirrored the larger culture all
too accurately. But if it offered young white middle-class men a different
version of masculinity than was available in the dominant culture, it offered
different possibilities for their female counterparts as well. The Movement
both was and wasn’t the larger culture for white women. As Sara Evans has
shown, it was in the New Left and the black freedom movement that white
women acquired the skills, confidence, and political savvy necessary to dis-
cern the disjuncture between those movements’ egalitarian rhetoric and
their own subordination. It was here that they encountered black women
whose self-reliance and assertiveness were at odds with the “feminine mys-
tique.” It was here, in the Movement, not in the larger culture. Although
some feminist memoirs, especially those by Ellen Willis, Elinor Langer, and
Kathie Sarachild, acknowledge this complicated history,40 most depict the
New Left in particular as unremittingly sexist.41
I don’t dispute that the women’s liberation movement caused many male
leftists pain or that the New Left resisted feminism. But too many left and
feminist reconstructions of the sixties misremember the past by treating the
antagonism between these movements as somehow inevitable. Initially, even
radical feminists, who were at the time often wrongly accused of being an-
tileft, saw feminism as involving an expansion rather than a rejection of left
analysis. They imagined themselves building a feminist radicalism and con-
tinuing to work on both left and feminist political projects.42 Had the New
Left not been in retreat from prefigurative politics, the relationship between
these two movements might have developed very differently.
But the relentlessness of the war machine in Vietnam, the government’s
all-out war against black radicalism, and growing feelings of impotence
among white radicals exiled from the black movement and unable or un-
prepared to fight white racism where it lived, led white new leftists toward a
politics of desperation.43 This politics took different forms as some, em-
bracing the (only recently) repudiated labor metaphysic, took jobs in facto-
ries in order to organize the white working class while others cast them-
selves as auxiliaries to the Black Panther Party or hoped to ignite a youth
revolt. What all of these strategies shared was the conviction that authentic
radicalism could not emerge among middle-class white students from col-
lege campuses. The idea that genuine radicalism (as opposed to mere liber-
alism) involved acknowledging and fighting one’s own oppression, not
struggling exclusively on behalf of other more downtrodden groups, was
discredited just at the moment when women, empowered by that idea, were
raising the issue of male dominance.44 New Leftists dismissed the idea that
women (much less the white middle-class women in the ranks of the New
Left) were oppressed. Their trivialization and derogation of women’s liber-
ation as bourgeois and/or diversionary resulted not only from a desire to
hold onto male privilege but also from the way in which class and race were
now enshrined as the privileged categories. Women’s liberationists re-
sponded by appropriating critiques of colonialism and the logic of black
power to describe women’s oppression and legitimate their struggle. Over

time, and with the ascendance of cultural feminism—a strand that grew out
of radical feminism but diverged from it in significant ways—anger at the
left often solidified into an antileft politics. Under these circumstances a
feminist radicalism simply could not grow.
Leftist and feminist constructions of this period not only fail to histori-
cize the conflict between women’s liberation and the New Left but also ob-
scure what these two movements had in common, including the historical
moment they shared. If New Left men were rebelling against the domesti-
cated masculinity of their postwar fathers, women’s liberationists were re-
belling against the domesticated femininity of their mothers. If New Left
men were drawn to C. Wright Mills, women’s liberationists were drawn to
Simone de Beauvoir, most obviously because of The Second Sex but also be-
cause of the independent female characters in her fiction and her own un-
conventional relationship with Sartre.45 New Left men and women were in
flight from both the nuclear family and the gender conventions of their day.
What neither could know was that the “breadwinner/homemaker nuclear
family” was an “aberrant and highly fragile” family system, one “already
passing from the scene” by the late sixties, as Judith Stacey and Deborah
Rosenfelt have argued.46
Feminist and leftist accounts of the period also elide other connections
between women’s liberation and the larger Movement. Although it is true
that the women’s movement has persisted (albeit in weakened form) while
much of the U.S. New Left burned up and out in a spectacular fashion, often
leaving little trace of itself in the larger culture, the two experienced many
of the same dilemmas. Both movements discovered that creating group
structures that were at once democratic and efficient was no mean feat. Both
tended to conflate reform and reformism, a move that resulted in a too-total
rejection of all reform. Nor was either able to acknowledge difference or
own up to the inequalities that existed, whether in the “beloved communi-
ty” or the “sisterhood.” And, finally, both found it difficult not to succumb
to the idea that somebody else out there—African Americans, the working
class, or lesbians—must be the revolutionary agent of change.
More importantly, it is difficult to imagine women’s liberation establish-
ing itself as a radical force without the philosophical breakthroughs made by
new leftists and black radicals. While the left was often antagonistic to
feminism, it nevertheless gave women considerable intellectual ammuni-

tion in building their own movement. This is, of course, the paradox at the
core of the relationship between these two movements. The conviction that
radicalism involved fighting one’s own oppression, the commitment to both
prefigurative politics and participatory democracy, the genesis of identity
politics, and most importantly, the idea that the “personal is political”—all
originated in the New Left and the civil rights movement.
the remapping of the sixties that I envision would involve a narrative

decentering of the New Left. It would acknowledge the women’s liberation
movement as a quintessentially sixties movement and would emphasize just
how significant its redefinition of the political has been in the larger cul-
ture. It would be exciting to see histories of the sixties written in what Elsa
Barkley Brown calls a “multivocal” style, so that we understand more about
the variety of sixties radical movements and their often interrelated histo-
ries.47 Finally, any remapping must necessarily involve a greater effort to
locate sixties radicalism within the postwar United States. Resource mobi-
lization theorists were perhaps the first to pursue this path.48 But I would
like to see more attention paid to official and oppositional discourses and
the popular culture of the postwar period. For instance, recently it has been
argued persuasively that the discourse of the Cold War, with its strategic
rhetoric of democracy, may have unintentionally helped ignite the civil
rights movement.49 As I’ve already suggested, I think we could also benefit
from an exploration into the ways that, for young white people in the Unit-
ed States, the sixties represented a gendered generational revolt against the
ultradomestic fifties.
As others have pointed out, masculinity became a contested terrain in
the postwar United States as the breadwinner ethic came under attack from
a variety of sources.50 I would expand the typical list of rebels to include
fifties rock ’n’ rollers and sixties new leftists. I am struck by the way in
which the domesticated masculinity of the postwar period is challenged re-
peatedly by the Beats, rock ’n’ roll culture, and white new leftists. Disaffect-
ed white men in all these examples come to identify, I think, with those
forced to live on the margins of America, especially African-American men.
(Think, for instance, of the centrality and recurrence of the phrase “rolling
stone(s)” to the sixties. It was the old proverb “a rolling stone gathers no
moss” that inspired blues singer Muddy Waters to first use the phrase as the
title of one of his songs, which was how the phrase came to be appropriated
by the Rolling Stones. On this side of the Atlantic, Bob Dylan had his first
Top 40 hit with “Like a Rolling Stone.” Finally, the aboveground magazine
that best reflected the sixties was, of course, called Rolling Stone.)51
What interests me here is the way in which these revolts against domes-
ticated masculinity did sometimes call into question racial categories. (The
Organization Man and the white-collar worker were both racially marked
concepts.) One can certainly see this in relation to rock ’n’ roll, where what
is most threatening about the genre is the way in which it is perceived by
much of white America as disrupting racial boundaries, not only by bring-
ing different racial groups into contact with one another but by promoting
“jungle rhythms.”52 Rock changes the meaning of “whiteness” as white
men, especially, strive to emulate a “black” musical style and stance, there-
by challenging the cultural devaluation of “black” music. This is why Elvis,
the “Hillbilly Cat” with his pomaded, dyed hair and “black”-inspired dress,
moves, and vocal style, was so revolutionary. He violated and confounded
the racial boundaries of the fifties.53 (Of course, it was business as usual in
the sense that once again a white person was reaping the profits from this
appropriation of “black” music.)
What I want to suggest is that white rock ’n’ rollers’ revolt against do-
mesticated masculinity, by leading them to identify with black men whom
they perceived as both unencumbered by domesticity and having (in the
words of the writer Claude Brown) “masculinity to spare” (or “the juice,” as
Gitlin put it), may have contributed to a shift in America’s color line. Over
twenty years ago, in Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver called the Twist “a guided
missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia.”54 Rock
did have a profound impact, desegregating the radio waves and much of the
music charts, bringing together different racial and ethnic groups at dances
and concerts, and changing blacks’ and whites’ self-perceptions. In ways we
don’t yet know, rock ’n’ roll reconstructed the meanings of “whiteness” and
“blackness,” which as Tom Holt has argued are, of course, absolutely inter-
dependent.55 This is not to say that racial boundaries are not constantly
rearticulated—they are, as in the gradual construction of rock itself as a
“white” music. But if we want to get at the sixties, we will have to consider
that Cleaver may be right that rock ’n’ roll helped prepare the ground.
Still, what is missing from Cleaver’s analysis (and what it shares with the
sixties books under discussion here) is any acknowledgment of gender’s
role in the transformations of the sixties. This is especially striking since it
was dissatisfaction with the dominant model of masculinity that in part fu-
eled the birth of rock ’n’ roll. Moreover, as rock ’n’ roll destabilized the cat-
egories of whiteness and blackness, so did it necessarily destabilize notions
of masculinity and femininity. In fact, rock ’n’ roll allows us to see the ways
in which race, gender, class, and sexuality exist not as abstract and distinct
categories, but are, rather, mutually constitutive identities. While it seems
that rock ’n’ roll did involve, at least initially, a greater challenge to domes-
ticated masculinity than to domesticated femininity, further research may
reveal that this is to some extent a function of the way in which histories of
rock, like histories of the sixties, place women on the sidelines. Future
studies may very well uncover ways in which young white women and girls
also harnessed rock’s subversive and rebellious possibilities. Then we may
have a better understanding of the white women’s side of the sixties gener-
ational revolt—the women’s liberation movement—that is so vital a part of
the sixties story.
4
“Nothing Distant About It”: Women’s
Liberation and Sixties Radicalism
O
n september 7, 1968, the sixties
came to that most apple-pie of
American institutions, the Miss
America Pageant. One hundred women’s liberation activists descended
upon Atlantic City to protest the pageant’s promotion of physical attrac-
tiveness as the primary measure of women’s worth. Carrying signs that
read, “Miss America Is a Big Falsie,” “Miss America Sells It,” and “Up
Against the Wall, Miss America,” they formed a picket line on the board-
walk, sang anti-Miss America songs in three-part harmony, and performed
guerrilla theater. Later that day, they crowned a live sheep Miss America
and paraded it on the boardwalk to parody the way the contestants, and, by
extension, all women, “are appraised and judged like animals at a county
fair.” They tried to convince women in the crowd that the tyranny of beau-
ty was but one of the many ways that women’s bodies were colonized. By an-
nouncing beforehand that they would not speak to male reporters (or to any
man for that matter), the demonstrators challenged the sexual division of
labor that consigned female reporters to the “soft” stories while reserving
for male reporters the coveted “hard” news stories. Newspaper editors who
wanted to cover the protest were thus forced to pull their women reporters
from the society pages.1
The protesters set up a “Freedom Trash Can” and filled it with various
“instruments of torture”—high-heeled shoes, bras, girdles, hair curlers,
This essay was published in David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to
History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Used by
permission of the publisher.
false eyelashes, typing books, and representative copies of Cosmopolitan,

Playboy, and Ladies Home Journal. They had wanted to burn the contents of
the Freedom Trash Can, but they were thwarted by a city ordinance prohibit-
ing bonfires on the boardwalk. However, word had been leaked to the press
that the protest would include a symbolic bra-burning, and, as a conse-
quence, reporters were everywhere.2 Although they burned no bras that day
on the boardwalk, the image of the bra-burning, militant feminist remains
part of our popular mythology about the women’s liberation movement.
The activists also managed to make their presence felt inside the audi-
torium during that night’s live broadcast of the pageant. Pageant officials
must have known that they were in for a long night when early in the evening
one protester sprayed Toni Home Permanent Spray (one of the pageant’s
sponsors) at the mayor’s booth. She was charged with disorderly conduct
and “emanating a noxious odor,” an irony that women’s liberationists un-
derstandably savored. The more spectacular action occurred later that
night. As the outgoing Miss America read her farewell speech, four women
unfurled a banner that read, “Women’s Liberation,” and all sixteen protest-
ers shouted “Freedom for Women” and “No More Miss America” before se-
curity guards could eject them. The television audience heard the commo-
tion and could see it register on Miss America’s face as she stumbled
through the remainder of her speech. But the program’s producer prevent-
ed the cameramen from covering the cause of Miss America’s consterna-
tion.3 The TV audience did not remain in the dark for long, because Mon-
day’s newspapers described the protest in some detail. As the first major
demonstration of the fledgling women’s liberation movement, it had been
designed to make a big splash, and after Monday morning no one could
doubt that it had.
In its wit, passion, and irreverence, not to mention its expansive formu-
lation of politics (to include the politics of beauty, no less!), the Miss Amer-
ica protest resembled other sixties demonstrations. Just as women’s liber-
ationists used a sheep to make a statement about conventional femininity,
so had the Yippies a week earlier lampooned the political process by nomi-
nating a pig, Pegasus, for the presidency at the Democratic National Con-
vention.4 Although Atlantic City witnessed none of the violence that had oc-
curred in Chicago, the protest generated plenty of hostility among the six
hundred or so onlookers who gathered on the boardwalk. Judging from
“Nothing Distant About It” 77
their response, this new thing, “women’s liberation,” was about as popular
as the antiwar movement. The protesters were jeered, harassed, and called
“man-haters” and “commies.” One man suggested that “it would be a lot
more useful” if the demonstrators threw themselves, and not their bras,
girdles, and make-up, into the trash can.5
But nothing—not even the verbal abuse they encountered on the board-
walk—could diminish the euphoria women’s liberationists felt as they start-
ed to mobilize around their own, rather than other people’s, oppression.
Ann Snitow speaks for many when she recalls that in contrast to her experi-
ence in the larger, male-dominated protest Movement,6 where she had felt
sort of “blank and peripheral,” women’s liberation was like “an ecstasy of
discussion.” Precisely because it was about one’s own life, there was, she
says, “nothing distant about it.”7 Robin Morgan has claimed that the Miss
America protest “announced our existence to the world.”8 That is only a
slight exaggeration, for as a consequence of the protest, women’s liberation
achieved the status of a movement both to its participants and to the media;
as such, the Miss America demonstration represents an important moment
in the history of the sixties.9
Although the women’s liberation movement only began to take shape
toward the end of the decade, it was a quintessentially sixties movement. It
is not just that many early women’s liberation activists had prior involve-
ments in other sixties movements, although that was certainly true, as has
been ably documented by Sara Evans.10 And it is not just that, of all the six-
ties movements, the women’s liberation movement alone carried on and
extended into the 1970s that decade’s political radicalism and rethinking of
fundamental social organization. Although that is true as well. Rather, it is
also that the larger, male-dominated protest Movement, despite its con-
siderable sexism, provided much of the intellectual foundation and cultur-
al orientation for the women’s liberation movement, many of whose ideas
and approaches—especially its concern with revitalizing democratic
process and reformulating “politics” to include the personal—were refined
and recast versions of those already present in the New Left and the black
freedom movement.
Moreover, like other sixties radicals, women’s liberationists were re-
sponding at least in part to particular features of the postwar landscape. For
instance, both the New Left and the women’s liberation movement can be
understood as part of a gendered generational revolt against the ultra-

domesticity of that aberrant decade, the 1950s. Sixties radicals, white and
black, were also responding to the hegemonic position of liberalism and its
promotion of government expansion both at home and abroad—the wel-
fare/warfare state. Although sixties radicals came to define themselves in
opposition to liberalism, their relation to liberalism was nonetheless com-
plicated and ambivalent. They saw in big government not only a way of
achieving greater economic and social justice, but also the possibility of an
increasingly manipulated society and an ever more remote government.
In this essay I will attempt to evaluate some of the more important fea-
tures of sixties radicalism by focusing on the specific example of the
women’s liberation movement. Although my accounting of the sixties is in
some respects critical, I nonetheless believe that there was much in sixties
radicalism that was original and hopeful, including its challenge to estab-
lished authority and expertise, its commitment to refashioning democracy
and “politics,” and its interrogation of such naturalized categories as gen-
der and race.
women’s discontent with their place in America in the 1960s was, of

course, produced by a broad range of causes. Crucial in reigniting feminist
consciousness in the 1960s was the unprecedented number of women (es-
pecially married white women) being drawn into the paid labor force, as the
service sector of the economy expanded and rising consumer aspirations
fueled the desire of many families for a second income.11 As Alice Kessler-
Harris has pointed out, “homes and cars, refrigerators and washing ma-
chines, telephones and multiple televisions required higher incomes.” So
did providing a college education for one’s children. These new patterns of
consumption were made possible in large part through the emergence of the
two-income family as wives increasingly “sought to aid their husbands in
the quest for the good life.” By 1960, 30.5 percent of all wives worked for
wages.12 Women’s growing labor force participation also reflected larger
structural shifts in the U.S. economy. Sara Evans has argued that the
“reestablishment of labor force segregation following World War II ironi-
cally reserved for women a large proportion of the new jobs created in the
fifties due to the fact that the fastest growing sector of the economy was no
longer industry but services.”13 Women’s increasing labor force participa-
tion was facilitated as well by the growing number of women graduating

from college and the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960.
Despite the fact that women’s “place” was increasingly in the paid work
force (or perhaps because of it), ideas about women’s proper role in Amer-
ican society were quite conventional throughout the fifties and the early six-
ties, held there by a resurgent ideology of domesticity—what Betty Friedan
coined the “feminine mystique.” But, as Jane De Hart-Mathews has ob-
served, “the bad fit was there: the unfairness of unequal pay for the same
work, the low value placed on jobs women performed, the double burden of
housework and wage work.”14 By the mid-sixties at least some American
women felt that the contradiction between the realities of paid work and
higher education on the one hand, and the still pervasive ideology of do-
mesticity on the other, had become irreconcilable.
However, without the presence of other oppositional movements the
women’s liberation movement might not have developed at all as an organ-
ized force for social change. It certainly would have developed along vastly
different lines. The climate of protest encouraged women, even those not di-
rectly involved in the black movement and the New Left, to question conven-
tional gender arrangements. Moreover, as already noted, many of the women
who helped form the women’s liberation movement had been involved as
well in the male-dominated Movement. If the larger Movement was typical-
ly indifferent, or worse, hostile, to women’s liberation, it was nonetheless
through their experiences in that Movement that the young and predomi-
nantly white and middle-class women who initially formed the women’s lib-
eration movement became politicized. The relationship between women’s
liberation and the larger Movement was at its core paradoxical. The Move-
ment was a site of sexism, but it also provided white women a space in which
they could develop political skills and self-confidence, a space in which they
could violate the injunction against female self-assertion.15 Most important,
it gave them no small part of the intellectual ammunition—the language and
the ideas—with which to fight their own oppression.
Sixties radicals struggled to reformulate politics and power. Their strug-
gle confounded many who lived through the sixties as well as those trying to
make sense of the period some thirty years later. One of the most striking
characteristics of sixties radicals was their ever-expanding opposition to lib-
eralism. Radicals’ theoretical disavowal of liberalism developed gradually
and in large part in response to liberals’ specific defaults—their failure to

repudiate the segregationists at the 1964 Democratic National Convention,
their lack of vigor in pressing for greater federal intervention in support of
civil rights workers, and their readiness (with few exceptions) to support
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. But initially
some radicals had argued that the Movement should acknowledge that liber-
alism was not monolithic but contained two discernible strands—“corpo-
rate” and “humanist” liberalism. For instance, in 1965 Carl Oglesby, an early
leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), contrasted corporate
liberals, whose identification with the system made them “illiberal liberals,”
with humanist liberals, who he hoped might yet see that “it is this movement
with which their own best hopes are most in tune,”16
But by 1967 radicals were no longer making the distinction between hu-
manist and corporate liberals that they once had. This represented an im-
portant political shift for early new leftists in particular, who once had felt an
affinity of sorts with liberalism.17 Black radicals were the first to decisively
reject liberalism, and their move had an enormous impact on white radicals.
With the ascendancy of black power many black militants maintained that
liberalism was intrinsically paternalistic, and that black liberation required
that the struggle be free of white involvement. This was elaborated by white
radicals, who soon developed the argument that authentic radicalism in-
volved organizing around one’s own oppression rather than becoming in-
volved, as a “liberal” would, in someone else’s struggle for freedom. For in-
stance, in 1967 Gregory Calvert, another SDS leader, argued that the “student
movement has to develop an image of its own revolution . . . instead of be-
lieving that you’re a revolutionary because you’re related to Fidel’s struggle,
Stokely’s struggle, always someone else’s struggle.”18 Black radicals were also
the first to conclude that nothing short of revolution—certainly not John-
son’s Great Society programs and a few pieces of civil rights legislation—
could undo racism. As leftist journalist Andrew Kopkind remembered it, the
rhetoric of revolution proved impossible for white new leftists to resist.
“With black revolution raging in America and world revolution directed
against America, it was hardly possible for white radicals to think themselves
anything less than revolutionaries.”19
Radicals’ repudiation of liberalism also grew out of their fear that liber-
alism could “co-opt” and thereby contain dissent. Thus, in 1965 when Pres-
ident Johnson concluded a nationally televised speech on civil rights by

proclaiming, “And we shall overcome,” radicals saw in this nothing more
than a calculated move to appropriate Movement rhetoric in order to blunt
protest. By contrast, more established civil rights leaders reportedly
cheered the president on, believing that his declaration constituted a sig-
nificant “affirmation of the movement.”20 Liberalism, then, was seen as
both compromised and compromising. In this, young radicals were influ-
enced by philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who emphasized the system’s abil-
ity to reproduce itself through its recuperation of dissent.21
Just as radicals’ critique of materialism developed in the context of rela-
tive economic abundance so did their critique of liberalism develop at a time
of liberalism’s greatest political strength. The idea that conservativism might
supplant liberalism at some point in the near future was simply unimagin-
able to them. (To be fair, this view wasn’t entirely unreasonable given John-
son’s trouncing of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election.)
This was just one of many things which distinguished new leftists from
old leftists, who, having lived through McCarthyism, were far more con-
cerned about the possibility of a conservative resurgence. For if sixties rad-
icals grew worlds apart from liberals, they often found themselves in con-
flict with old leftists as well. In general, new leftists rejected the economism
and virulent anticommunism of the noncommunist old left. In contrast to
old leftists whose target was “class-based economic oppression,” new left-
ists (at least before 1969 when some new leftists did embrace dogmatic ver-
sions of Marxism) focused on “how late capitalist society creates mecha-
nisms of psychological and cultural domination over everyone.”22 For young
radicals the problem went beyond capitalism and included not only the
alienation engendered by mass society, but also other systems of hierarchy
based on race, gender, and age. Indeed, they were often more influenced by
existentialists like Camus, or social critics like C. Wright Mills or Herbert
Marcuse, both of whom doubted the working class’s potential for radical ac-
tion, than by Marx or Lenin. For instance, SDS president Paul Potter con-
tended it would be “through the experience of the middle class and the
anesthetic of bureaucracy and mass society that the vision and program of
participatory democracy will come.”23 This rejection of what Mills dubbed
the “labor metaphysic” had everything to do with the different circum-
stances radicals confronted in the sixties. As Arthur Miller observed, “The
radical of the thirties came out of a system that had stopped and the impor-
tant job was to organize new production relations which would start it up
again. The sixties radical opened his eyes to a system pouring its junk over
everybody, or nearly everybody, and the problem was to stop just that, to es-
cape being overwhelmed by a mindless, goalless flood which marooned
each individual on his little island of commodities.”24
Sixties radicals initially rejected orthodox versions of Marxism, but over
time many did appropriate, expand, and recast Marxist categories in an effort
to understand the experiences of oppressed and marginalized groups. Thus
exponents of what was termed “new working-class theory” claimed that peo-
ple with technical, clerical, and professional jobs should be seen as constitut-
ing a new sector of the working class, better educated than the traditional
working class, but working class nonetheless. According to this view, students
were not members of the privileged middle class, but rather “trainees” for the
new working class. And many women’s liberationists (even radical feminists
who rejected Marxist theorizing about women’s condition) often tried to use
Marxist methodology to understand women’s oppression. For example, Shu-
lamith Firestone argued that just as the elimination of “economic classes”
would require the revolt of the proletariat and their seizure of the means of
production, so would the elimination of “sexual classes” require women’s re-
volt and their “seizure of control of reproduction.”25
Young radicals often assumed an arrogant stance toward those remnants
of the old left that survived the fifties, but they were by the late sixties un-
ambiguously contemptuous of liberals. Women’s liberationists shared new
leftists’ and black radicals’ rejection of liberalism, and, as a consequence,
they often went to great lengths to distinguish themselves from the liberal
feminists of the National Organization for Women (NOW). (In fact, their
disillusionment with liberalism was more thorough during the early stages
of their movement-building than had been the case for either new leftists or
civil rights activists because they had lived through the earlier betrayals
around the the War and civil rights. Male radicals’ frequent denunciations
of feminism as “bourgeois” also encouraged women’s liberationists to dis-
tance themselves from NOW.) NOW had been formed in 1966 to push the
federal government to enforce the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
outlawing sex discrimination—a paradigmatic liberal agenda focused on
public access and the prohibition of employment discrimination. To
women’s liberationists, NOW’s integrationist, access-oriented approach

ignored the racial and class inequalities that were the very foundation of the
“mainstream” that the feminists of NOW were dedicated to integrating. In
the introduction to the 1970 bestseller she edited, Sisterhood Is Powerful,
Robin Morgan declared that “NOW is essentially an organization that wants
reforms [in the] second-class citizenship of women—and this is where it
differs drastically from the rest of the Women’s Liberation Movement.”26 In
The Dialectic of Sex Shulamith Firestone described NOW’s political stance as
“untenable even in terms of immediate political gains” and deemed it
“more a leftover of the old feminism rather than a model of the new.”27 Rad-
ical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson went even further, characterizing many in
NOW as only wanting “women to have the same opportunity to be oppres-
sors, too.”28
Women’s liberationists also took issue with liberal feminists’ formula-
tion of women’s problem as their exclusion from the public sphere. Younger
activists argued instead that women’s exclusion from public life was inextri-
cable from their subordination in the family, and would persist until this
larger problem was addressed. For instance, Firestone claimed the solution
to women’s oppression wasn’t inclusion in the mainstream, but rather the
eradication of the biological family, which she argued was the “tapeworm
of exploitation.”29
Of course, younger activists’ alienation from NOW was often more than
matched by NOW members’ annoyance with them. Many liberal feminists’
were appalled (at least initially) by women’s liberationists’ politicization of
personal life. NOW founder Betty Friedan frequently railed against
women’s liberationists for waging a “bedroom war” that diverted women
from the real struggle of integrating the public sphere.30
Women’s liberationists believed that they had embarked upon a much
more ambitious project—the virtual remaking of the world.31 Nothing short
of radically transforming society was sufficient to deal with what they were
discovering: that gender inequality was thoroughly embedded in everyday
life. As Shulamith Firestone put it, “sex-class is so deep as to be invisi-
ble.”32 The pervasiveness of sexism and gender’s status as a naturalized cat-
egory demonstrated to women’s liberationists the inadequacy, the shallow-
ness, of NOW’s legislative and judicial remedies and the necessity of
thoroughgoing social transformation. Thus, whereas liberal feminists
talked of ending sex discrimination, women’s liberationists called for noth-

ing less than the destruction of patriarchy and capitalism. As defined by
feminists, patriarchy, in contrast to sex discrimination, defied reform. For
example, Adrienne Rich contended: “Patriarchy is the power of the fathers:
a familial-social, ideological, political system by force, direct pressure, or
through ritual, tradition, law and language, customs, etiquette, education,
and the division of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play,
and in which the female is subsumed under the male.”33
Women’s liberationists typically indicted capitalism as well. Ellen
Willis, for instance, maintained that “the American system consists of two
interdependent but distinct parts—the capitalist state, and the patriarchal
family.” Willis argued that capitalism succeeded in exploiting women as
cheap labor and consumers “primarily by taking advantage of women’s sub-
ordinate position in the family and our historical domination by man.”34
Central to the revisionary project of the women’s liberation movement
was the desire to render gender meaningless, to explode it as a significant
category. In the movement’s view, both masculinity and femininity repre-
sented not timeless essences, but rather “patriarchal” constructs. (Of course,
even as the movement sought to deconstruct gender, it was, paradoxically, as
many have noted, trying to mobilize women precisely on the basis of their
gender.35) This explains in part the significance abortion rights held for
women’s liberationists, who believed that until abortion was decriminalized
biology would remain women’s destiny, thus foreclosing the possibility of
women’s self-determination.36
Indeed, the women’s liberation movement made women’s bodies the
site of political contestation. The “colonized” status of women’s bodies be-
came the focus of much movement activism. The discourse of colonization
originated in Third World national liberation movements, but in an act of
First World appropriation was taken up by black radicals who claimed that
African Americans constituted an “internal colony” in the U.S. Radical
women trying to persuade the Movement of the legitimacy of their cause
soon followed suit by deploying the discourse to expose women’s subordi-
nate position in relation to men. This appropriation represented an impor-
tant move, and one characteristic of radicalism in the late sixties, that is, the
borrowing of conceptual frameworks and discourses from other move-
ments to comprehend the situation of oppressed groups in the U.S.—with
mixed results at best. In fact, women’s liberationists challenged not only

tyrannical beauty standards, but also violence against women, women’s sex-
ual alienation, the compulsory character of heterosexuality and its organi-
zation around male pleasure (inscribed in the privileging of the vaginal over
the clitoral orgasm), the health hazards associated with the birth control
pill, the definition of contraception as women’s responsibility, and, of
course, women’s lack of reproductive control. They also challenged the sex-
ual division of labor in the home, employment discrimination, and the ab-
sence of quality child-care facilities. Finally, women’s liberationists recog-
nized the power of language to shape culture.
The totalism of their vision would have been difficult to translate into a
concrete reform package, even had they been interested in doing so. But
electoral politics and the legislative and judicial reforms that engaged the
energies of liberal feminists did little to animate most women’s libera-
tionists. Like other sixties radicals, they were instead taken with the idea of
developing forms that would prefigure the utopian community of the imag-
ined future.37 Anxious to avoid the “manipulated consent” that they be-
lieved characterized American politics, sixties radicals struggled to develop
alternatives to hierarchy and centralized decision-making.38 They spoke
often of creating “participatory democracy” in an effort to maximize indi-
vidual participation and equalize power. Their attempts to build a “democ-
racy of individual participation” often confounded outsiders, who found
Movement meetings exhausting and tedious affairs.39 But to those radicals
who craved political engagement, “freedom” was, as one radical group en-
thused, “an endless meeting.”40 According to Gregory Calvert, participato-
ry democracy appealed to the “deep anti-authoritarianism of the new gen-
eration in addition to offering them the immediate concretization of the
values of openness, honesty, and community in human relationships.”41
Women’s liberationists, still smarting from their first-hand discovery that
the larger Movement’s much-stated commitment to egalitarianism did not
apply equally to all, often took extraordinary measures to try to ensure egal-
itarianism. They employed a variety of measures in an effort to equalize
power, including consensus decision-making, rotating chairs, and the
sharing of both creative and routine movement work.
Fundamental to this “prefigurative politics,” as sociologist Wini Breines
terms it, was the commitment to developing counterinstitutions that would
anticipate the desired society of the future.42 Staughton Lynd, director of

the Mississippi Freedom Schools and a prominent new leftist, likened six-
ties radicals to the Wobblies (labor radicals of the early twentieth century)
in their commitment to building “the new society within the shell of the
old.”43 According to two early SDSers, “What we are working for is far more
than changes in the structure of society and its institutions or the people
who are now making the decisions. . . . The stress should rather be on
wrenching people out of the system both physically and spiritually.”44
Radicals believed that alternative institutions would not only satisfy
needs unmet by the present system but also, perhaps, by dramatizing the
failures of the system, radicalize those not served by it but currently outside
the Movement. Tom Hayden proposed that radicals “build our own free in-
stitutions—community organizations, newspapers, coffeehouses—at points
of strain within the system where human needs are denied. These institu-
tions become centers of identity, points of contact, building blocks of a new
society from which we confront the system more intensely.”45
Among the earliest and best known of such efforts were the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party and the accompanying Freedom Schools formed
during Freedom Summer of 1964. In the aftermath of that summer’s De-
mocratic National Convention, Bob Moses [Parris] of the Student Nonvio-
lent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) even suggested that the Movement
abandon its efforts to integrate the Democratic Party and try instead to es-
tablish its own state government in Mississippi. And as early as 1966
SNCC’s Atlanta Project called on blacks to “form our own institutions, cred-
it unions, co-ops, political parties.”46 This came to be the preferred strate-
gy as the sixties progressed and disillusionment with traditional politics
grew. Rather than working from within the system, new leftists and black
radicals instead formed alternative political parties, media, schools, uni-
versities, and assemblies of oppressed and unrepresented people.
Women’s liberationists elaborated on this idea, creating an amazing
panoply of counterinstitutions. In the years before the 1973 Supreme Court
decision decriminalizing abortion, feminists established abortion referral
services in most cities of any size. Women’s liberationists in Chicago even
operated an underground abortion clinic, “Jane,” where they performed
about one hundred abortions each week.47 By the mid-seventies most big
cities had a low-cost feminist health clinic, a rape crisis center, and a femi-
nist bookstore. In Detroit after “a long struggle to translate feminism into

federalese” two women succeeded in convincing the National Credit Union
Administration that feminism was a legitimate field from which to draw
credit union members. Within three years of its founding in 1973, the De-
troit credit union could claim assets of almost one million dollars. Femi-
nists in other cities soon followed suit. Women’s liberation activists in
Washington, D.C., formed an all-women’s record company, Olivia Records,
which by 1978 was supporting a paid staff of fourteen and producing four
records a year.48 By the mid-seventies there existed in most cities of any
size a politicized feminist counterculture, or a “women’s community.”
The popularity of alternative institutions was that they seemed to hold out
the promise of political effectiveness without co-optation. Writing in 1969,
Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), an accomplished poet and black na-
tionalist, maintained, “But you must have the cultural revolution. . . . We can-
not fight a war, an actual physical war with the forces of evil just because we’re
angry. We can begin to build. We must build black institutions . . . all based
on a value system that is beneficial to black people.”49
Jennifer Woodul, one of the founders of Olivia Records, argued that ven-
tures like Olivia represented a move toward gaining “economic power” for
women. “We feel it’s useless to advocate more and more ‘political action’ if
some of it doesn’t result in the permanent material improvement of the
lives of women.”50 Robin Morgan termed feminist counterinstitutions
“concrete moves toward self-determination and power.”51 The situation, it
turned out, was much more complicated. Women involved in nonprofit
feminist institutions such as rape crisis centers and shelters for battered
women found that their need for state or private funding sometimes mili-
tated against adherence to feminist principles.
Feminist businesses, by contrast, discovered that while they were rarely
the objects of co-optation, the problem of recuperation remained. In many
cases the founders of these institutions became the victims of their own suc-
cess, as mainstream presses, recording companies, credit unions, and banks
encroached upon a market they had originally discovered and tapped.52 For
instance, by the end of the seventies, Olivia was forced to reduce its staff al-
most by half and to scuttle its collective structure.53 Today k.d. lang, Tracy
Chapman, Michelle Shocked, and Sinead O’Connor are among those androg-
ynous women singers enjoying great commercial success, but on major labels.
Although Olivia helped lay the groundwork for their achievements, it finds its
records, as Arlene Stein has observed, “languishing in the ‘women’s music’
section in the rear [of the record store] if they’re there at all.”54
The move toward building counterinstitutions was part of a larger strat-
egy to build new societies “within the shell of the old,” but this shift some-
times had unintended consequences. While feminist counterinstitutions
were originally conceived as part of an active culture of resistance, over time
they often became more absorbed in sustaining themselves than in con-
fronting male supremacy, especially as their services were duplicated by
mainstream businesses. In the early years of the women’s liberation move-
ment this alternative feminist culture did provide the sort of “free space”
women needed to critically confront sexism. But as it was further developed
in the mid-seventies, it ironically often came to promote insularity in-
stead—becoming, as Adrienne Rich has observed, “a place of emigration, an
end in itself,” where patriarchy was evaded rather than confronted.55 In
practice, feminist communities were small, self-contained subcultures that
proved hard to penetrate, especially to newcomers unaccustomed to their
norms and conventions. The shift in favor of alternative communities may
have sometimes impeded efforts at outreach for the women’s liberationists,
new leftists, and black radicals who attempted it.
On a related issue, the larger protest Movement’s pessimism about re-
form—the tendency to interpret every success as a defeat resulting in the
Movement’s further recuperation (what Robin Morgan called “futilitarian-
ism”)—encouraged a too-global rejection of reform among sixties radicals.
For instance, some women’s liberationists actually opposed the Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA) when NOW revived it. In September 1970, The
Feminists, a group based in New York, denounced the ERA and advised
feminists against “squandering invaluable time and energy on it.”56 A del-
egation of Washington, D.C. women’s liberationist activists invited to ap-
pear before the senate subcommittee considering the ERA testified: “We are
aware that the system will try to appease us with their [sic] paper offerings.
We will not be appeased. Our demands can only be met by a total transfor-
mation of society which you cannot legislate, you cannot co-opt, you cannot
control.”57 And in The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone went so far as to dismiss
child-care centers as attempts to “buy women off” because they “ease the
immediate pressure without asking why the pressure is on women.”58
Similarly, many SDS leaders opposed the National Conference for New
Politics (NCNP), an abortive attempt to form a national progressive organ-
ization oriented around electoral politics, and to launch an antiwar presi-
dential ticket headed by Martin Luther King and Benjamin Spock. Immedi-
ately following NCNP’s first and only convention, in 1967, the SDS paper
New Left Notes published two front-page articles criticizing NCNP organiz-
ers. One writer contended that “people who recognize the political process
as perverted will not seek change through the institutions that process has
created.”59 The failure of sixties radicals to distinguish between reform and
reformism meant that while they defined the issues, they often did very lit-
tle to develop policy initiatives around those issues.60 Moreover, the preoc-
cupation of women’s liberationists with questions of internal democracy
(fueled in part by their desire to succeed where the men had failed) some-
times had the effect of focusing attention away from the larger struggle in an
effort to create the perfect movement. As feminist activist Frances Chap-
man points out, women’s liberation was “like a generator that got things
going, cut out and left it to the larger reform engine which made a lot of mis-
takes.”61 In eschewing traditional politics rather than entering them skep-
tically, women’s liberationists, like other sixties radicals, may have lost an
opportunity to foster critical debate in the larger arena.
Young radicals eschewed the world of conventional politics, but they
nonetheless had a profound impact upon it, especially by redefining what is
understood as “political.” Although the women’s liberation movement pop-
ularized the slogan “the personal is political,” the idea that there is a polit-
ical dimension to personal life was first embraced by early SDSers who had
encountered it in the writings of C. Wright Mills.62 Rebelling against a social
order whose public and private spheres were highly differentiated, new
leftists called for a reintegration of the personal with the political. They
reconceptualized apparently personal problems—specifically their alien-
ation from a campus cultural milieu characterized by sororities and frater-
nities, husband and wife hunting, sports, and careerism, and their power-
lessness as college students without a voice in campus governance or
curriculum—as political problems. Thus, SDS’s founding Port Huron State-
ment of 1962 suggested that for an American New Left to succeed, it would
have to “give form to . . . feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that
people may see the political, social, and economic sources of their private
troubles and organize to change society.”63 Theirs was a more expansive

formulation of politics than what prevailed in the old left.64 Power was con-
ceptualized as relational and by no means reducible to electoral politics.
By expanding political discourse to include personal relations, new left-
ists unintentionally paved the way for women’s liberationists to develop cri-
tiques of the family, marriage, and the construction of sexuality. (Of course,
nonfeminist critiques of the family and sexual repressiveness were hardly
in short supply in the fifties and sixties, as evidenced by Rebel Without a
Cause, Catcher in the Rye, and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, to mention
but a few.) Women’s liberationists developed an understanding of power’s
capillary-like nature, which in some respects anticipated those being for-
mulated by Michel Foucault and other poststructuralists.65 Power was con-
ceptualized as occupying multiple sites, and as lodging everywhere, even in
those private places assumed to be the most removed from or impervious to
politics—the home, and more particularly, the bedroom.
The belief of sixties radicals that the personal is political also suggested
its converse—that the political is personal. Young radicals typically felt it
was not enough to sign leaflets or participate in a march if one returned to
the safety and comfort of a middle-class existence. Politics was supposed to
unsettle life and its routines—even more, to transform life. For radicals the
challenge was to discover underneath all the layers of social conditioning
the “real” self unburdened by social expectations and conventions. Thus,
SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael advanced the slogan, “Every Negro is a po-
tential black man.”66 And Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt argued that
among the “most exciting things to come out of the women’s movement so
far is a new daring . . . to tear down old structures and assumptions and let
real thought and feeling flow.”67 Life would not be comfortable, but who
wanted comfort in the midst of so much deadening complacency? For a
great many radicals, the individual became a site of political activism in the
sixties. In the black freedom movement the task was very much to discover
the black inside the Negro, and in the women’s liberation movement it was
to unlearn niceness, to challenge the taboo against female self-assertion.68
Sixties radicalism proved compelling to many precisely because it
promised to transform life. Politics was not about the subordination of self
to a larger political cause; instead it was the path to self-fulfillment. This ul-
timately was the power of sixties radicalism. As Stanley Aronowitz notes,
sixties radicalism was in large measure about “infus[ing] life with a secular
spiritual and moral content,” and “fill[ing] the quotidian with personal
meaning and purpose.”69 But “the personal is political” was one of those
ideas whose rhetorical power sometimes seemed to work against or under-
mine its explication. It could encourage a solipsistic preoccupation with
self-transformation. As new leftist Richard Flacks presciently noted in
1965, this kind of politics could lead to “a search for personally satisfying
modes of life while abandoning the possibility of helping others to change
theirs.”70 Thus the idea that “politics is how you live your life, not who you
vote for,” as Yippie leader Jerry Rubin put it, could and did lead to a subor-
dination of politics to lifestyle.71 But if the idea led some to confuse person-
al liberation for political struggle, it led others to embrace an asceticism
that sacrificed personal needs and desires to political imperatives. Some
women’s liberation activists followed this course, interpreting the idea that
the personal is political to mean that one’s personal life should conform to
some abstract standard of political correctness. At first this tendency was
mitigated by the founders’ insistence that there were no personal solutions,
only collective solutions, to women’s oppression. However, over time one’s
self-presentation, marital status, and sexual preference frequently came to
determine one’s standing or ranking in the movement. The most notorious
example of this involved the New York radical group, The Feminists, who
established a quota to limit the number of married women in the group.72
Policies such as these prompted Barbara Ehrenreich to question “a femi-
nism which talks about universal sisterhood, but is horrified by women who
wear spiked heels or call their friends ‘girls.”’73 At the same time, what was
personally satisfying was sometimes upheld as politically correct. In the
end, both the women’s liberation movement and the larger protest Move-
ment suffered, as the idea that the personal is political was often interpret-
ed in ways that made questions of lifestyle absolutely central.
The social movements of the sixties signaled the beginning of what has
come to be known as “identity politics,” the idea that politics is rooted in
identity.74 Although some New Left groups by the late sixties did come to
endorse an orthodox Marxism whereby class was privileged, class was not
the pivotal category for these new social movements.75 (Even those New
Left groups which reverted to the “labor metaphysic” lacked meaningful
working-class participation.) Rather, race, ethnicity, gender, youth, and,
eventually, sexual orientation/preference were the salient categories for

most sixties activists. In the women’s liberation movement, what was
termed “consciousness-raising” was the tool used to develop women’s
group identity.
As women’s liberationists started to organize a movement, they con-
fronted American women who identified unambiguously as women, but who
typically had little of what historian Nancy Cott would call “we-ness,” or
“some level of identification with ‘the group called women.”’76 Moreover,
both the pervasiveness of gender inequality and the cultural understanding
of gender as a natural rather than a social construct made it difficult to culti-
vate a critical consciousness about gender even among women. To engender
this sense of sisterhood or “we-ness,” women’s liberationists developed
consciousness-raising, a practice involving “the political reinterpretation of
personal life.”77 According to its principal architects, its purpose was to
“awaken the latent consciousness that . . . all women have about our oppres-
sion.” In talking about their personal experiences, it was argued, women
would come to understand that what they had believed were personal prob-
lems were, in fact, “social problems that must become social issues and
fought together rather than with personal solutions.”78
New York women’s liberationist Kathie Sarachild was reportedly the per-
son who coined the term consciousness-raising. However, the technique origi-
nated in other social movements. As Sarachild noted in 1973, those who pro-
moted consciousness-raising “were applying to women and to ourselves as
women’s liberation organizers the practice a number of us had learned in the
civil rights movement in the South in the early 1960s.”79 There they had seen
that the sharing of personal problems, grievances, and aspirations—“telling it
like it is”—could be a radicalizing experience. Moreover, for some women’s
liberationists consciousness-raising was a way to avoid the tendency of some
in the movement to try to fit women into existing (and often Marxist) theo-
retical paradigms. By circumventing the “experts” on women and going to
women themselves, they would be able not only to construct a theory of
women’s oppression but to formulate strategy as well. Thus women’s libera-
tionists struggled to find the commonalities in women’s experiences in order
to generate generalizations about women’s oppression.
Consciousness-raising was enormously successful in exposing the in-
sidiousness of sexism and in engendering a sense of identity and solidar-
ity among the largely white, middle-class women who participated in “c-
r” groups. By the early seventies even NOW, whose founder Betty Friedan
had initially derided consciousness-raising as so much “navel-gazing,”
began sponsoring c-r groups.80 But the effort to transcend the particular
was both the strength and weakness of consciousness-raising. If it en-
couraged women to locate the common denominators in their lives, it in-
hibited discussion of women’s considerable differences. Despite the par-
ticularities of white, middle-class women’s experiences, theirs became
the basis for feminist theorizing about women’s oppression. In a more
general sense the identity politics informing consciousness-raising tend-
ed to privilege experience in certain problematic ways. It was too often as-
sumed that there existed a kind of core experience, initially articulated as
“women’s experience.” Black and white radicals (the latter in relation to
youth) made a similar move as well. When Stokely Carmichael called on
blacks to develop an “ideology which speaks to our blackness” he, like
other black nationalists, suggested that there was somehow an essential
and authentic “blackness.”
With the assertion of difference within the women’s movement in the
eighties, the notion that women constitute a unitary category has been
problematized. As a consequence, women’s experiences have become ever
more discretely defined, as in “the black female experience,” “the Jewish
female experience,” or “the Chicana lesbian experience.” But, as Audre
Lorde has argued, there remains a way in which, even with greater and
greater specificity, the particular is never fully captured.81 Instead, despite
the pluralization of the subject within feminism, identities are often still
imagined as monolithic. Finally, the very premise of identity politics—that
identity is the basis of politics—has sometimes shut down possibilities for
communication as identities are seen as necessarily either conferring or
foreclosing critical consciousness. Kobena Mercer, a British film critic, has
criticized the rhetorical strategies of “authenticity and authentication” that
tend to characterize identity politics. He has observed: “If I preface a point
by saying something like, ‘as a black gay man, I feel marginalized by your
discourse,’ it makes a valid point but in such a way that preempts critical di-
alogue because such a response could be inferred as a criticism not of what
I say but of who I am. The problem is replicated in the familiar cop-out
clause, ‘as a middle-class, white, heterosexual male, what can I say?’”82
The problem is that the mere assertion of identity becomes in a very real
sense irrefutable. Identity is presented as stable and fixed, and insur-
mountable. While identity politics gives the oppressed the moral authority
to speak (perhaps a dubious ground from which to speak), it can, ironical-
ly, absolve those belonging to dominant groups from having to engage in a
critical dialogue. In some sense, then, identity politics can unintentionally
reinforce Other-ness. Finally, as the antifeminist backlash and the emer-
gence of the New Right should demonstrate, there is nothing inherently
progressive about identity. It can be, and has been, mobilized for reac-
tionary as well as well as for radical purposes.83 For example, the participa-
tion of so many women in the antiabortion movement reveals just how
problematic the reduction of politics to identity can be.
Accounts of sixties radicalism usually cite its role in bringing about the
dismantling of Jim Crow and disfranchisement, the withdrawal of U.S.
troops from Vietnam, and greater gender equality. However, equally impor-
tant, if less frequently noted, was its challenge to politics as usual. Sixties
radicals succeeded both in reformulating politics, even mainstream poli-
tics, to include personal life, and in challenging the notion that elites alone
have the wisdom and expertise to control the political process. For a mo-
ment, people who by virtue of their color, age, and gender were far from the
sites of formal power became politically engaged, became agents of change.
Given the internal contradictions and shortcomings of sixties radical-
ism, the repressiveness of the federal government in the late sixties and
early seventies, and changing economic conditions in the United States, it
is not surprising that the movements built by radicals in the sixties either
no longer exist or do so only in attenuated form. Activists in the women’s
liberation movement, however, helped to bring about a fundamental re-
alignment of gender roles in this country through outrageous protests,
tough-minded polemics, and an “ecstasy of discussion.” Indeed, those of
us who came of age in the days before the resurgence of feminism know
that the world today, while hardly a feminist utopia, is nonetheless a far
different, and in many respects a far fairer, world than what we confront-
ed in 1967.
Part 2
Feminism, Sexual Freedom,
and Identity Politics
Some readers might find my linking of feminism and sexual freedom

peculiar, but many second-wave feminists believed the two were inex-
tricably connected. Ellen Willis, for instance, once quipped that many
early radical feminists like herself “felt about the sexual revolution
what Ghandi reputedly thought of Western civilization—that it would be
a good idea.” My 1984 essay, “The Taming of the Id,” which was pub-
lished in Pleasure and Danger, both criticizes the feminist antipornog-
raphy movement and argues for that strain of feminism that believes
sexual repression is the problem, not the solution. (An earlier version
of this essay, which I wrote in 1981, was published as “The New Femi-
nism of Yin and Yang” in the 1983 collection Powers of Desire.) “The
Taming of the Id” was written for the 1982 Barnard conference on sex-
uality, and it is an uncompromising polemic. The tone of the piece is so
indignant and unforgiving that it makes me cringe. However, at the
time the antipornography movement felt like a juggernaut. I was con-
vinced that it represented the culmination of a larger process of re-
trenchment and accommodation that threatened to empty feminism of
its maverick-like vision. It’s safe to say that this didn’t happen, at least
when it came to sex, because most women, thank God, were not ready
to condemn their desires to the dustbin of false consciousness.
Although I think many of my criticisms of cultural feminism are on
the nose, I want to amend and clarify certain parts of my argument. In
the early eighties when this was written, it was widely assumed that the
best way to make sense of feminism’s heterogeneity was to break it
down into competing camps, or theoretical strands—usually liberal,
socialist, and radical. In arguing for a new category, cultural feminism,
I was, I suppose, encouraging the further taxonomizing of feminism,
though that was hardly my aim. My effort to capture the broad outlines
96 feminism, sexual freedom, and identity politics
of this shift within the movement led me to attribute more ideological

coherence to cultural feminism than was there. Susan Brownmiller
and Catharine MacKinnon were antiporn and in some ways even an-
tileft, but they couldn’t have been less interested in celebrating the
Goddess or women’s culture. Although the term cultural feminism was
initially resisted, it has become commonplace, at least in the work of
feminist scholars. Yet I would argue that this schema of cultural, radi-
cal, liberal, and socialist feminism, while a useful road map in under-
standing second-wave feminism, has virtually no explanatory power in
making sense of today’s women’s movement.
It’s become almost axiomatic that 1970s feminists were unstylish,
humorless, and prudish, and my work is sometimes cited as proof that
this was so. In truth, as I tried to make clear in “Taming,” feminism was
not monolithic in regards to sexuality. Moreover, despite the initial
knee-jerk acceptance of antiporn thinking by much of the feminist
community, there was always a dissonance between theory and practice
when it came to sex.
In 1993 I began writing journalistic pieces—at first book reviews for
the Village Voice and The Nation. In 1993 the Voice asked me to review
Shulamith Firestone’s great, eccentric 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex,
which had just been reprinted. I used the opportunity to contextualize
her work, which is in so many ways at odds with feminism today. Most
people would find Catharine MacKinnon’s work more recognizably fem-
inist than Firestone’s. In 1994 I returned to the porn wars when I re-
viewed MacKinnon’s 1993 book of essays Only Words for the Voice. The
rest of the articles in this section have never before been published. I
wrote “Gender Disobedience, Academia, and Popular Culture” in 1995
for a special issue of the L.A. Weekly on “gender fuck” that was scuttled. “
‘Thousands of Men and a Few Hundred Women,”’ began as a 1995 talk
about rock singer Janis Joplin’s ambiguous, much-talked-about, sexual-
ity. I have revised it substantially in light of all I learned from Joplin’s
many friends and lovers in the course of researching her life. I wrote
“Queer Like Us?” for this collection, but it began as a series of book re-
views on recent titles in gay and lesbian history that I’d done for The Na-
tion. Rather than reprint those reviews I have written an essay that aims
to acquaint readers with the critical issues raised by gay and lesbian his-
torians over the past twenty-five years.
5
The Dworkinization of
Catharine MacKinnon
W
ith only words , catharine
MacKinnon has issued a rant
worthy of her longtime col-
laborator, Andrea Dworkin. While MacKinnon’s ideas about the perni-
ciousness of pornography are indistinguishable from those of her sidekick,
she has always struck a very different pose in her writing and self-presen-
tation. In fact, Dworkin and MacKinnon owe much of their success as an-
tiporn divas to their act as feminism’s Odd Couple. Whereas MacKinnon fa-
vors the sort of elegant power suits Susan Dey once sported on L.A. Law,
Dworkin is attached to overalls and T-shirts, giving her the look of an unre-
constructed ’70s lesbian feminist. In their public appearances MacKinnon
was the cool, clever, erudite legal scholar, Dworkin the barnstormer—the
proverbial wild-eyed radical.
While both have written passionate fulminations against women’s op-
pression, MacKinnon has, until now, labored to give hers a scholarly patina.
Pick up the article that established her as a force to be reckoned with in
women’s studies, her 1982 essay in Signs—“Feminism, Marxism, Method,
and the State: An Agenda for Theory”—and you’ll discover a text dwarfed by
fat footnotes displaying her familiarity with writers as diverse as Georg
Lukacs, Helene Cixous and Michel Foucault.1 While MacKinnon never shied
away from extreme formulations such as “Man fucks woman; subject verb
object,” she embedded her zingers in the turgid prose for which academics
This essay was previously published as “Sex and the Single-Minded: The
Dworkinization of Catharine MacKinnon” in the Village Voice Literary
Supplement, March 1994.
have become famous.2 MacKinnon has been rewarded very nicely for this
scholarly drag. She has tenure at the University of Michigan Law School and
publishes with Harvard University Press. Dworkin, by contrast, publishes
with nonscholarly presses, enjoys no academic affiliation, and is regarded
by many as a crackpot.
However, in this exceedingly slender collection of her recent essays
MacKinnon seems determined to beat Dworkin at her own game. Gone are
the apparently logical arguments and learned asides. Only Words opens with
a nightmarish description of “women’s reality”:
Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas,

your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror
you live with, are unspeakable—not the basis of literature. You grow
up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so
another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.
When you are older, your husband ties you to the bed and drips hot
wax on your nipples and brings in other men to watch and makes you
smile through it. Your doctor will not give you drugs he has addicted
you to unless you suck his penis.3
This lurid composite—what MacKinnon calls “facts” she’s “adapted”

from two court cases and drawn from her own “confidential consultations
with women who have been used in pornography”—is classic, over-the-
top Dworkin.4 But by playing Dworkin’s role so well, MacKinnon has
screwed up the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine that made her seem the rea-
sonable alternative.
It remains to be seen whether MacKinnon has abandoned the old duet
permanently. Certainly it has served her well, not only with Dworkin but in
relation to those early radical feminists whose ideas her work builds on.
Whereas some radical feminists like Kate Millett became movement stars,
MacKinnon is the only radical feminist to achieve superstardom in the
academy. Yet anyone familiar with contemporary feminist theory knows
that her notions about gender and sexuality are just dressed-up versions of
a particular strand of radical feminism; Only Words has a long history.
The idea that (hetero)sexuality reinforces women’s oppression, for ex-
ample, was a truism among radical feminists in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
The Dworkinization of Catharine MacKinnon 99
This insight suggested wildly different possibilities to those feminists for

whom it was axiomatic. If feminism encouraged the pursuit of sexual pleas-
ure for some, for others it was about getting women out of the bedroom.
Where you came down on the issue had a lot to do with what you believed to
be the bigger culprit—sexual repression or sexual liberation.
To the radical feminists who influenced MacKinnon, sexuality was a
place of domination and subordination, something women needed to be lib-
erated from. This position was most fully articulated by Ti-Grace Atkinson,
dubbed the movement’s “haute thinker” twenty-five years ago by the New
York Times.5 Atkinson claimed that heterosexuality acts as a “reassuring re-
minder” to men of their “class supremacy” and as a “convenient reminder
to the female of her class inferiority.”6 In Signs, MacKinnon took this idea
further, arguing that “sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality.”7 Gen-
der doesn’t determine sexuality, as other radical feminists had imagined;
it’s the other way around. MacKinnon even contended that women actually
are gendered through the experience of “ ‘having sex.”’8 Just as the “organ-
ized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others defines a
class—workers—[so] the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for
the use of others defines the sex—woman.”9
For MacKinnon sexuality will remain an arena of male domination and
female subordination until gender equality is achieved. Not surprisingly,
she has argued that, under conditions of male supremacy, “consent” is
highly overrated. Although MacKinnon admitted in Feminism Unmodified:
Discourses on Life and Law that sex might feel good, might even involve the
“glimpsing of freedom,” she rejected any thought that it might be empow-
ering for women.10 She has sneered at feminists who had the nerve to write
about women as historical agents: “In the law, agent means someone whose
strings are being pulled by someone else.”11
It is just this gloomy depiction of women as perpetually at the mercy of
others—pimps, pornographers, civil libertarians, and anticensorship fem-
inists who are themselves the pawns of pimps—that’s made Katie Roiphe
and Camille Paglia overnight sensations. Who wouldn’t find “postfemi-
nism” attractive when prominent feminists treat women as history’s fa-
vorite victims, snookered time and again? The media have played a role in
the postfeminist turn, too. By ignoring saucy anticensorship feminists, the
media have made feminism synonymous with MacKinnonism. Indeed,
most reviews of Only Words fail to even mention that MacKinnon’s views are
by no means gospel among feminists.
MacKinnon’s conviction that women’s strings are always being pulled
and that sexuality is never in their own interest led her to criticize Roe v
Wade for “facilitating women’s heterosexual availability” and “freeing male
aggression” by removing one of the very few “legitimized reasons women
have had for refusing sex.”12 Before Anita Hill went public, MacKinnon
scolded women’s groups for opposing Clarence Thomas’s nomination sim-
ply because of “scanty evidence about his views on abortion,” and stressed
that, as a conservative, he might be more comprehending of the “real injury
pornography causes women.”13
Feminists who disagree with MacKinnon are “elitist,” “idealist,” or,
worst of all, “liberal.”14 To critics who point out that many women don’t ex-
perience sex as unrelieved oppression, MacKinnon has countered that “a
worker can sometimes have a good day or even a good job,” but that “does
not mean . . . the work is not exploited labor, structurally speaking.”15 She
chides those who disagree for being radical on every other subject but lib-
eral on sex (not that this has ever stopped MacKinnon, as her own position
on Thomas makes clear). MacKinnon’s use of the worker-boss relationship
to make sense of heterosexuality assumed not only that the personal is po-
litical but that power works the same way in both arenas. This worker-
woman analogy recalls the crudest socialist-feminism, which imagined, as
Barbara Ehrenreich put it, that every time “a mother kissed her children
good night she was ‘reproducing labor power.”’16
MacKinnon the theorist has become MacKinnon the celebrity feminist
largely because of her work on pornography; Only Words is its perverse cul-
mination. But MacKinnon was a latecomer to the antiporn struggle. Until
the law professor signed on, antiporn feminists had succeeded in accom-
plishing one thing: creating acrimonious, crippling conflict within the
women’s movement. MacKinnon’s genius lay in making an end run around
her feminist opponents, whom she must have despaired of ever persuading,
and going directly to legislators and the courts. She and Dworkin drafted an
antiporn ordinance for Indianapolis that skirted the censorship problem by
making pornography actionable as a civil-rights violation. In contrast to
conservatives, who fought pornography on obscenity grounds, the duo em-
phasized its role in women’s subordination. Although U.S. courts have re-
The Dworkinization of Catharine MacKinnon 101
jected this approach, the Canadian Supreme Court has been more receptive.
Its recent Butler ruling affirmed MacKinnon’s logic, with the result that
Dworkin’s own Pornography: Men Possessing Women, was seized at the border.
In Only Words MacKinnon struggles to make sexual-harassment law,
which she helped define, a leading wedge in her struggle against porn. She
notes that, as a consequence of harassment law, porn in the workplace is
understood to create a “hostile unequal working environment.” Unfortu-
nately, “there is no law against a hostile unequal living environment, so
everywhere else [pornography] is protected speech.” Some of you may won-
der how it is that a man whacking off to Juggs in his bathroom is engaged in
a public act of sex discrimination. What about private space? Or fantasy?
MacKinnon maintains that “sooner or later, in one way or another, the
consumers [of porn] want to live out the pornography further in three di-
mensions. . . . It makes them want to.”17 Pornography’s central message—
“’get her”’—is “addressed directly to the penis, delivered through an erec-
tion, and taken out on women in the real world.”18 Porn is an “unconscious
mental intrusion and physical manipulation . . . giving men erections that
support aggression against women.”19 Pornography makes the man. In ear-
lier work, MacKinnon discussed porn as both cause and effect of male su-
premacy; here, she comes close to indicting porn as wholly responsible for
male domination. The idea that pornography circumvents thought by acting
directly on the penis—a revival of postwar hysteria about subliminal mes-
sages?—allows MacKinnon to counter both her First Amendment critics
who define porn as speech and her many feminist opponents who question
why she focuses so relentlessly on sexually explicit material when there is so
much misogyny elsewhere.
For the first time, MacKinnon situates her argument against pornogra-
phy in a larger discussion about free speech and gender and racial equality.
She claims the First and Fourteenth Amendments are on a “collision
course”: “Fourteenth Amendment equality . . . has grown as if equality could
be achieved while the First Amendment protected the speech of inequali-
ty.”20 For MacKinnon, the solution is simple enough. “Wherever equality is
mandated, racial and sexual epithets, vilification, and abuse should be able
to be prohibited, unprotected by the First Amendment.”21 She acknowl-
edges that “distinguishing talk about inferiority from verbal imposition of
inferiority may be complicated at the edges.” But, she reassures us, “it is
clear enough at the center with sexual and racial harassment, pornography,
and hate propaganda.”22 She declines to “spell out all the policy implica-
tions of such a view,” but argues that “those who wish to keep materials that
promote inequality from being imposed on students . . . especially without
critical commentary, should not be legally precluded from trying. . . . No
teacher should be forced to teach falsehoods.”23
But a falsehood for whom? Just as one person’s pornography is another’s
erotica, so is one person’s falsehood another’s truth. Would histories of
prostitution that take into account the agency of prostitutes be verboten on
the grounds that this somehow nullifies or ignores their oppression? Would
Khalid Abdul Muhammad’s remarks at Kean College be regarded as hate
speech or a salutary blow against white supremacy?
Recently I was helping a women’s studies student decipher the com-
ments I’d scribbled on her term paper. She was puzzled that I had circled
her phrase “low-income status persons.” I explained that it was awkward, to
which she replied, “But what should I say?” I suggested “poor.” She was
silent for a few seconds before informing me she could never use that word.
I told her about Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, but to no
avail; the word was beyond the pale of political rectitude. Later, in talking
with a friend, it occurred to me that the banishing of “poor” from her vo-
cabulary involved an unintended banishment of poverty itself.
Like Only Words, this underscores the depressing reality that for some
people politics has come to mean the policing of attitudes through the sup-
pression of speech—an impoverished practice that replaces political vision
with political purity, analysis with moralizing, and hopefulness with despair.
6
“Totally Ready to Go”: Shulamith
Firestone and The Dialectic of Sex
L
ong before others, shulamith
Firestone understood the radical
possibilities of badness. Almost
twenty-five years ago she urged women to “dare to be bad.” For Firestone,
risking badness meant refusing femininity. It meant resisting the cultural
imperative that white girls always be nice and their lives small and circum-
scribed. Firestone was determined to eliminate all vestiges of her own (ad-
mittedly minimal) good-girlism, and this sometimes got her into trouble,
even in the movement she helped found. At a time when sharing the “shit-
work” was doctrine, Firestone balked. Asked at a meeting to help with typ-
ing, Firestone reportedly refused, explaining she had already done a life-
time’s worth of typing and hadn’t joined the movement to do more. Even
her friend Ellen Willis admits, “Shulie could be snarky about that.”
The movement’s commitment to remaining leaderless, what Jo Freeman
called its “tyranny of structurelessness,” presented problems for everyone,
but especially for those who weren’t good girls. They found themselves, as
Firestone put it, in the “peculiar position of having to eradicate, at the same
time, not only their submissive natures, but their dominant natures as well,
thus burning their candle at both ends.”1 This proved to be an insurmount-
able problem for Firestone, who, not coincidentally, left the women’s
movement at the very moment she could have become one of its leading
spokeswomen. By the time The Dialectic of Sex hit bookstores, in October
1970, Firestone had already retired.
This essay was previously published as “Like a Hurricane: Shulamith Fire-

stone’s Wild Ride” in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, October 1993.
Her retreat was a tragedy for the movement. There was nothing like The
Dialectic of Sex. Kate Millett’s pioneering Sexual Politics was a sober tome.
Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was provocative but annoyingly coy.
From its opening line—“Sex class is so deep as to be invisible”—The Dialec-
tic of Sex is a passionate, brilliant, and uncompromising book. Now that it
has been reissued, people can marvel at the intelligence and irreverence of
this woman who in her midtwenties tried to develop a new dialectical mate-
rialism based on gender.2
Firestone’s feminist reworkings of Marx, Engels, and Freud were always
bold, sometimes breathtaking, and occasionally weird. Her reclamation of
Freud was especially nervy. If U.S. feminists were united on anything it was
their contempt for Freud. Ever the maverick, Firestone declared Freud of
even greater relevance than Marx and Engels. She argued that feminism and
Freudianism were both responses to the “increasing privatization of family
life, its extreme subjugation of women, and the sex repressions and subse-
quent neuroses this caused.” Over time, however, Freudianism “flourished
at the expense of Feminism” as it “acted as a container of [feminism’s]
shattering force.” Firestone’s analysis of feminism’s historical relationship
to psychoanalysis is intriguing, and more interesting than her reinterpreta-
tion of Freud. As Juliet Mitchell noted, Firestone’s revision of Freud denied
the very existence of the unconscious—when the very fact of the unconscious
was, after all, Freud’s point.
Whereas many feminists writing at the time went to great lengths to prove
that Marxism really did explain sexism, Firestone declared that Marx and
Engels “knew next to nothing” about women. What she did appreciate, and
appropriate, was their analytic method—dialectical materialism. If socialism
required the elimination of “economic class” through “the revolt of the un-
derclass and their seizure of production,” so feminism required “the elimina-
tion of sexual classes” through the “revolt of women and the seizure of con-
trol of reproduction.” Just as socialism would end the class distinction, so
would feminism end the “sex distinction.” Although Firestone was a social-
ist, she believed the dialectic of sex, not class, was the great motor of history.
Firestone located male supremacy, or “sex-class,” in the “natural repro-
ductive difference between the sexes.” Given antifeminists’ fondness for
biological explanations of male supremacy, her argument was quite start-
ling. But where they proclaimed biology destiny, Firestone called for artifi-
“Totally Ready to Go” 105
cial reproduction, or as she bluntly put it, “getting rid of nature.” By elimi-
nating pregnancy, cybernation would end the sexual division of labor, and
the “tyranny of the biological family.”
All radical feminists attacked the family as a site of women’s subordina-
tion, but Firestone went further. She argued that families are where domi-
nance and submission are learned and come to feel familiar. She main-
tained that Marx “was onto something more profound than he knew when
he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antag-
onisms that later develop on a wide scale within society.”3 For Firestone the
cause of racism, class exploitation, and the oppression of women and chil-
dren was the “psychology of power.” And the family was its incubator.
Even then Firestone’s ideas were controversial. To many feminists,
Firestone’s biological account of patriarchy seemed too bleak and her cy-
bernetic solution facile. Some wondered why biology couldn’t be recon-
ceived rather than gotten rid of. Feminist anthropologists argued strenu-
ously that the problem was the cultural interpretation of biology, not biology
itself. Sherry Ortner, for one, suggested the roots of male dominance were
cultural, the result of the apparently universal identification of men with
culture and women with nature. Ortner didn’t believe women actually were
closer to nature, a fact lost on the growing number of feminists committed
to reclaiming femaleness.
In the mid-’70s as radical feminism devolved into celebrations of the
Goddess and Mother-Right, Ortner was sometimes invoked to prove the su-
periority of femaleness. Firestone was invoked too, but unfavorably. Her
detractors judged her “male-identified.” You could see it in her repudiation
of gender, they said, not to mention her promotion of those “male” inven-
tions—socialism, polymorphous sexuality, and technology. Then there was
her strange conviction that women’s intimate relations with men encour-
aged rather than retarded feminism by putting a “revolutionary in every
bedroom.” Worse still, Firestone had pronounced pregnancy “barbaric.”4
By 1975 Firestone was rapidly becoming the negative referent, the bad girl
who harbored a contempt for all things “woman-identified.” Ten very long
years would pass before Donna Haraway’s heretical declaration, “I would
rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
I remember how confounded my women’s studies students were when
they read Firestone. Who was this strange woman who advocated getting rid
of nature, and who believed feminism would actually be advanced by hetero-

sexuality? How could she have been one of the founders of radical feminism?
Despite my best efforts, they often saw her as a historical curiosity, a relic of
a less evolved feminism. What their reaction revealed was the extent to which
radical feminism was becoming ossified in certain predictable ways.
By the early ’80s, mainstream feminists, never big fans of Firestone’s,
began attacking her and other radical feminists for having advanced a mas-
culinist vision of women’s equality. Betty Friedan accused feminists of ex-
pressing a “lack of reverence for childbearing,” and of fighting for “equality
in terms of male power.” Jean Elshtain hit Firestone more directly, calling
her utopia a “cybernetic Brave New World.” Friedan and Elshtain, advocates
of a kinder and gentler feminism, argued that the family was the final outpost
of compassion and nurturance in an otherwise heartless world and not, as
radical feminists believed, a locus of oppression. However, in opposing the
family, Firestone and other early radical feminists were not rejecting nur-
turance. They were calling for a reorganization of personal life so that care
and compassion would become the domain of both men and women.
Firestone knew she would be accused of creating a Brave New World
where “women had become like men, crippled in the identical way.” But,
she insisted, “we are suggesting the opposite: rather than concentrating the
female principle into a ‘private’ retreat, into which men periodically duck
for relief, we want to rediffuse it.”5 Firestone was quite clear on this—the
point was not the “drafting of women into a male world,” but the “elimina-
tion of the sex class distinction altogether.” However, it was to no avail be-
cause Firestone’s radical feminism provoked and revealed an enormous
cultural anxiety about who would provide the caretaking were women to stop
being “women.” Tellingly, her harshest critic, Elshtain, advised feminists to
follow the example of “the handicapped movement,” which she hailed for
having “transcended a politics of self-interest.”
Although Firestone didn’t want to make men of women, she did want to
escape femininity. It was her nightmare, and mine too. And why not, given
the hyperdomestic ’50s that consigned middle-class white girls to what
Friedan called “the comfortable concentration camp” of suburban homes,
or to virtual oblivion as single women? For Firestone, and many other early
radical feminists, liberation lay in the unashamed refusal of gender differ-
ence. This is what attracted me to radical feminism, and why celebrations of
“Totally Ready to Go” 107
“woman-identification” have always felt like a capitulation—a return to the

familiar prison of gender. Of course, it is more complicated than that. Writ-
ing on the equality-difference divide in modern feminism, Ann Snitow
points out that no one gets to “stay firmly on her side of the divide.” She
notes that even feminist activists who want women to be bad, “nonetheless
warn them there’s a price to pay for daring to defy men in public space.”6
And they are right. Yet, after years of “difference” feminism, I long for what
attracted me in the first place: the refusal of femininity.
No one practiced this better than Firestone, whose “ ‘dream”’ action for
women’s liberation was a “smile boycott,” in which “all women would instant-
ly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something
pleased them.” “In my own case,” Firestone explained, “I had to train myself
out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl.” For
women, smiling is the “equivalent of the shuffle; it indicates acquiescence of
the victim to [her] own oppression.” When it’s not forthcoming, men re-
spond violently; because “it makes them uncomfortable to know that the
woman or the child or the black or the workman is grumbling, the oppressed
groups must also appear to like their oppression.”7
In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone seemed “totally ready to go,” which is
how Patti Smith described herself on her 1975 debut album, “Horses.” Fire-
stone and Smith, the white girl visionaries of women’s liberation and punk
rock, respectively. Sure, there were differences. Firestone was committed
to analyzing gender, while Smith ignored it as she tried to live outside its
confines. But both had chutzpah at a time when it was still reserved for men.
Both were subjected to enormous critical abuse. And both opted for retire-
ment. In Without You I’m Nothing, Sandra Bernhard observes that Patti
Smith “saw so far into the future she could afford to take 10 years off and not
say another word.” Smith, however, continued to write, whereas Firestone’s
silence was only occasionally interrupted by a letter to Ms. or the Village
Voice in the 1970s.
But if Firestone disappeared from the movement, at least her book is
available again. How it will fare in the women’s studies programs where it
was once a staple, is another matter. The truth is that, even if Firestone was
ahead of her time in 1970, the book is far from hip now. Firestone’s quest was
for the truth, not “standpoints.” Moreover, in contrast to some of today’s
feminist theorists whose impenetrable prose and ritual genuflections to
Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault have become depressingly familiar (and may
be the academic expression of good-girlism), Firestone wrote without ob-
fuscation and took risks. Of course, it was a different era. Firestone, like
many ’60s theorists, wrestled with Marx and Freud—two thinkers who’ve
been relegated to theory’s bargain basement. Moreover, Firestone wrote for
a movement, not a tenure committee. As feminism found harbor inside the
academy, theoretical moves too often became career moves; the risk-taking
that characterized Firestone’s work was the casualty.
Then there’s the likely resistance of students who would rather condemn
feminism as irrevocably racist than analyze the reasons for its racism. Fire-
stone’s book, which is both remarkably astute and painfully obtuse about
race, would be an ideal text for getting at what Adrienne Rich called the
“snow blindness” of white feminists. On the one hand, just as new leftists
emulated black men, feminists like Firestone clearly took much of their in-
spiration from black women, whose self-reliance they envied and romanti-
cized. They considered themselves antiracist and were puzzled when women
of color stayed away from the movement. On the other hand, Firestone and
other white feminists were unable to see their many mechanisms of exclu-
sion, beginning with the assumption that their “woman” was everywoman.
Nor did they understand that their treatment of all other systems of hierar-
chy as mere “extensions of sexism” seemed a way of subsuming, and thus ig-
noring, race—the very maneuver that had been used against feminism.
Like so many ’60s books, searching for grand syntheses, The Dialectic of
Sex is simultaneously profound and flaky. Talk of totalizing politics and
mechanistic solutions! But one reads it not for prescriptions, but for Fire-
stone’s insights into the operations of gender and the family. Rereading The
Dialectic of Sex makes me wonder if the movement’s trajectory might not
have been different had Firestone stuck around. What if bad-girl feminism
hadn’t been overwhelmed by its good girl variant? Would “women’s music”
have rocked instead of bored? What if Firestone had continued pointing to
the difficulties in developing a feminist critique of sexuality? Would femi-
nists have paid greater attention to sexual pleasure? It was Firestone, after
all, who observed that feminism’s goal wasn’t the “elimination of sexual joy
and excitement,” but rather its “rediffusion” over “the spectrum of our
lives.” Who knows, maybe even Patti Smith would have felt an affinity with
feminism had Shulie stuck around.
7
The Taming of the Id:
Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968–1983
I
n reviewing the last fifteen
years of radical feminist sexual
politics, it seems that one element
has remained constant—sex is as difficult and contested an area for femi-
nists in 1983 as it was in the earliest days of the movement. Although it often
seems as though we have been engaged in one long, seamless debate all
these years, radical feminist sexual politics have changed in very funda-
mental ways over the decade. For instance, while early radical feminists
were hardly uninterested in identifying particular sexual expressions as
feminist and others patriarchal, today’s radical feminists have developed a
more highly prescriptive understanding of sexuality—one which in some
crucial respects is antithetical to early radical feminist sexual politics. In the
following pages, I will explore the permutations in radical feminist sexual
politics since the late 1960s so that we might better appreciate the theoret-
ical distance we have traveled.
However, it is impossible to understand current feminist views on sex-
uality without first analyzing broader shifts in feminist thinking on gender
over the past decade. In fact, our understanding of gender really informs
our analysis of sexuality. Early radical feminists believed that women’s op-
pression derived from the very construction of gender and sought its elim-
ination as a meaningful social category. Today’s radical feminists, by con-
trast, claim that our oppression stems from the repression of female values
and treat gender differences as though they reflect deep truths about the
This essay first appeared in Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Explor-
ing Female Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1984).
intractability of maleness and femaleness. For instance, in 1972 Bonnie

Kreps argued that women’s oppression “is based on the corrupt notion of
‘maleness vs. femaleness,”’ yet in 1979 Janice Raymond asks ominously
what feminists “can hope to agree on . . . if [we] cannot agree on the bound-
aries of what constitutes femaleness?”1
For any oppressed group it is tempting to seek solace in the reclaiming of
that identity which the larger culture has systematically denigrated. This ap-
proach becomes especially compelling when the possibilities for radical
change seem remote, and the only alternative seems to be assimilation into an
oppressive and inegalitarian system. Unfortunately, as recent feminism has
become synonymous with the rehabilitation of female values, it has come to
reflect and reproduce dominant cultural assumptions about women. For in-
stance, antipornography feminists suggest that women’s sexual inhibition is
further confirmation of women’s superiority rather than emblematic of our
oppression. And, in contradiction to early radical feminists who maintained
that the identification of women with nature is a patriarchal construct, many
ecofeminists and pacifist feminists claim not only that women are closer to
nature, but that our “bond with the natural order” makes us uniquely quali-
fied to save the planet from nuclear holocaust and ecological ruination.2
I believe that what we have come to identify as radical feminism repre-
sents such a fundamental departure from its roots that it requires renaming.
To this end, I will refer to this more recent strain of feminism as cultural fem-
inism, because it equates women’s liberation with the nurturance of a female
counter culture which it is hoped will supersede the dominant culture.3 Cul-
tural feminism’s polarization of male and female sexuality and its demoniza-
tion of the former and idealization of the latter has its political incarnation in
the antipornography movement. By the end of the 1970s, cultural feminism
had achieved hegemony within the movement and its celebration of female-
ness, which has led some to label it “femininism,” not only informs the an-
tipornography campaign, but ecofeminism and the feminist peace movement
as well. Like its French counterpart, néoféminité, cultural feminism is “an
ideal bound up through symmetrical opposition in the very ideological system
feminists want to destroy.”4 Of course, to propose that there exists a theoret-
ical coherence to cultural feminism is not to suggest that it is monolithic.
While cultural feminists are committed to preserving rather than chal-
lenging gender differences, some demonstrate a cavalier disregard for
The Taming of the Id 111
whether these differences are biological or cultural in origin. In The Trans-

sexual Empire, Janice Raymond argues:
Yet there are differences, and some feminists have come to realize
that those differences are important whether they spring from so-
cialization, from biology, or from the total history of existing as a
woman in a patriarchal society.
raymond considers the source of these differences irrelevant, because

she reasons that, as women, “we know who we are.” (her italics)5
Even more troubling than equivocation of this sort is the growing ten-
dency among other cultural feminists to invoke biological explanations of
gender differences. This is a particularly ironic development, given radical
feminists’ opposition to precultural explanations of gender asymmetry.6
These cultural feminists generally attribute male dominance to the rapa-
ciousness or barrenness of male biology. Thus Susan Brownmiller accepts
that rape is a function of male biology, while Mary Daly argues that the
“emptiness” of male biology explains male supremacy. As though it proves
her point, Daly cites archconservative George Gilder’s view that “while the
female body is full of internal potentiality, the male is internally barren.”7
While Daly suggests that men are “mutants [who may like other mutations]
manage to kill themselves off eventually,” Sally Gearhart insists that the
preservation of the planet requires that the “proportion of men must be re-
duced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.”8
Although radical feminists viewed female biology as a liability and thus
in some cases mirrored the culture’s devaluation of the female body, cultur-
al feminists have overreacted to this earlier position in arguing that female
biology is a powerful resource.9 While Jane Alpert’s 1973 article, “Mother-
Right,” is the earliest articulation of this revisionism, Adrienne Rich is its
most eloquent exponent:
I have come to believe, as will be clear throughout this book, that fe-
male biology . . . has far more radical implications than we have yet
come to appreciate. Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to
its own narrow specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from
female biology for these reasons; it will, I believe, come to view our
physicality as a resource, rather than a destiny. In order to live a truly

human life we require not only control of our bodies . . . we must touch
the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural
order, the corporeal ground of our intelligence. (her italics)10
although rich fails to acknowledge that feminist biological determin-

ism might reproduce dominant cultural assumptions about women,
Gearhart admits that it does:
But if by believing that women are by nature less violent we reinforce

the sex roles that have held women down for so long, then perhaps it is
time to dare to admit that some of the sex-role mythology is in fact true
and to insist that the qualities attributed to women (specifically empa-
thy, nurturance and cooperativeness) be affirmed as human qualities
capable of cultivation by men even if denied them by nature.11
Not all cultural feminists are enthusiastic supporters of biologically-

based explanations of gender. Both Florence Rush and Andrea Dworkin
have criticized biological determinism. However, for others, like Robin
Morgan, the danger lies less in the concept itself than in the control of its
application. Morgan has advised feminists against accepting “biological-
determination theories . . . until we have enough feminists to right the cur-
rent imbalance and bias and to create a genuinely value-free science.”12
This new feminist biological determinism, like its antifeminist coun-
terpart, is fraught with contradictions. For instance, cultural feminists dis-
tinguish between patriarchally conditioned femininity which they associate
with passivity and submissiveness, and female nature which they assume to
be nurturant, tender, and egalitarian. However, no such distinction is made
between patriarchally conditioned masculinity and biologically determined
maleness. So while female passivity is believed to be socially constructed,
male violence is seen as intrinsic and the crystallization of maleness.
Although radical feminists often stressed the psychological dimension of
women’s oppression, they understood the importance of analyzing and chal-
lenging the material basis of patriarchy. By contrast, cultural feminists have
demonstrated less interest in effecting structural change than in nurturing
an alternative female consciousness, or what Mary Daly terms “the spring
into free space.”13 Cultural feminists believe that the struggle against male
supremacy begins with women exorcizing the male within us and maximiz-
ing our femaleness. And while radical feminists were generally careful to
distinguish between individual and political solutions, cultural feminists
typically believe that individual solutions are political solutions. Cultural
feminism’s validation of individual solutions not only encouraged the
scrutiny of personal behavior rather than ideas but contributed to the devel-
opment of standards of “liberated” behavior. It has also fostered a blamato-
ry and elitist attitude among those who consider themselves “woman-iden-
tified.” In one of the most egregious examples of this, Daly has suggested that
heterosexual women could get themselves “off the hook of the . . . contracep-
tive dilemma” were they to follow the example of “Spinsters”—“women who
choose to be agents of be-ing”—and elect “Misterectomy.”14
Finally, whereas radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone believed
that a “sexual revolution much larger than—inclusive of—a socialist one [was
needed] to truly eradicate all class systems,” cultural feminists see capital-
ism and socialism as equally injurious to women.15 While radical feminists
“criticized the left from the left for refusing to broaden its analysis to account
for women’s oppression,” cultural feminists insist that feminism and the
left are intrinsically incompatible.16 For cultural feminists, the left, like
pornography, is an intrusive and contaminating force which prevents us
from fully “dispossessing ourselves” of our patriarchal past.17 In fact, cul-
tural feminism began to emerge as philosophically distinct from radical
feminism in early 1975 with the creation of the Circle of Support for Jane
Alpert. Rather than deny the charge that Alpert had supplied the FBI with
information about fellow members of the underground, the Circle rejoiced
in her defection from the left and her conversion to feminism.18
But it was in the mid-1970s phenomenon of feminist capitalism that cul-
tural feminism really took shape. These early cultural feminists treated cap-
italism as a relatively benign system that could be enlisted in the struggle to
defeat patriarchy.19 Some even embraced capitalism while repudiating dem-
ocratic process and rationalized this position by invoking women’s superi-
ority and commonality of interests.20 Those feminists who criticized their
attempt to wed capitalism with feminism were characterized as “aping” the
“correct-line politics” and “trashing” style of the male left.21 Antipornogra-
phy feminists have tried to silence their intramovement critics with the
same red-baiting tactics used against critics of feminist capitalism. Recent-

ly, Kathy Barry characterized the feminist opposition to the antipornogra-
phy movement as a cabal of leftist women—lesbian and heterosexual alike—
who want to destroy the movement so that “male leftists can continue their
sexual abuse of women without fear of censure.”22
Cultural feminists vilify the left because its analysis so completely con-
travenes their belief system, especially their faith that truly radical change
will be achieved only when the culture “returns” to female values and that
race and class are merely ancillary to gender hierarchy. Just as some social-
ists argue that socialism will eliminate women’s oppression, cultural femi-
nists maintain that feminism will eradicate race and class oppression. Cul-
tural feminist faith in women’s superiority and commonality not only
encourages them to label dissent “unsisterly” or left-inspired, but it pro-
motes political expediency as well.23
Given this theoretical incompatibility, how did radical feminism de-
volve into cultural feminism? In part the fragmentation within our ranks
and the erosion of feminist gains in the recent past have made cultural fem-
inism, with its promise of female unity, especially attractive. More specifi-
cally, the debate around the relationship of lesbianism to feminism was, to
a great extent, responsible for promoting the assumptions which underlie
cultural feminism. The struggle for lesbian visibility and recognition in the
1970s was extremely important because it forced feminists to acknowledge
that sexuality is socially conditioned and that heterosexuality is culturally,
rather than biologically, mandated. But the homophobia, and, to a lesser
extent, the antisex attitudes within certain elements of the movement pre-
cluded lesbian feminists from promoting lesbianism as a sexual rather than
a political choice. Initially, some heterosexual feminists, reflecting domi-
nant cultural assumptions, defined and dismissed lesbianism as a solely
sexual experience. And for Ti-Grace Atkinson, founder of the New York
group The Feminists, and Abby Rockefeller of the Boston group Cell 16, who
believed that sex is the foundation of women’s oppression, lesbianism was
particularly threatening. For instance, Atkinson cautioned:
A case could be made that lesbianism, in fact all sex, is reactionary,

and that feminism is revolutionary. . . . Because lesbianism involves
role-playing and more important, because it is based on the primary
assumption of male oppression, that is, sex, lesbianism reinforces

the sex class system. (her italics)24
and rockefeller argued that lesbianism “muddles what is the real issue
for women by making it appear that women really like sex as much as men—
that they just don’t like sex with men.” (her italics)25 Even Anne Koedt,
whose politics could hardly be characterized as erotophobic, hedged her ap-
proval of lesbianism:
Two lesbians who have chosen not to fall into imitative roles, but are
instead exploring the positive aspects of both “masculine” and “fem-
inine” behavior beyond roles—forming something new and equal in
the process—would in my opinion probably be healthy.26
given this context, it is understandable that many lesbian feminists found

it easier to justify their sexuality on exclusively political grounds.
Lesbian recognition was achieved by locating the discourse within the
already established framework of separatism. The conviction that feminism
is conditional upon separation from men predated lesbian separatism. For
example, The Feminists established a quota system at the time of their
founding in 1969 to limit women living with men to one-third of the group’s
membership.27 Lesbian separatists, like the Washington, D.C., Furies col-
lective, argued further that heterosexual women were impeding the move-
ment’s progress. Furies member Rita Mae Brown opined:
Straight women are confused by men, don’t put women first. They
betray lesbians and in its deepest form, they betray their own selves.
You can’t build a strong movement if your sisters are out there fuck-
ing with the oppressor.28
by defining lesbianism as a political choice and encouraging an ideal-

ization of female sexuality, lesbian feminists deprived heterosexual femi-
nists of one of their favorite charges against lesbianism—that it was male-
identified.29 However, this assumption that sexual relationships with men
are inevitably debilitating while those with women are automatically liber-
ating has had, as we shall see, serious consequences for lesbian sexuality.
Furthermore, in establishing lesbianism as a true measure of one’s com-

mitment to feminism, lesbian separatists distorted the meaning of “the
personal is political,” giving it a prescriptive rather than a descriptive
meaning. Of course, the tendency to judge a woman on the basis of her
sexual preference, marital status, or hair length did not originate with les-
bian separatism, but it was further legitimated by it.30
Lesbian separatism’s open hostility to heterosexual feminists guaran-
teed that it would remain a minority view. However, in its reincarnation as
cultural feminism, lesbian separatism has been modified and refined in
such a way as to make it more acceptable to a wider audience. Whereas les-
bian separatists advocated separation from men, cultural feminists advo-
cate separation from male values. And rather than promote lesbianism, cul-
tural feminists encourage woman-bonding and thus avoid estranging
heterosexual feminists.
With the rise of cultural feminism, relations between lesbian and hetero-
sexual feminists have become more cordial. However, the very terms of this
reconciliation have ensured that suspicion and acrimony would be pre-
served, though often below the surface. First, lesbian recognition has been
achieved by further abstracting it from the realm of sexuality—cloaking it as
female bonding. And lesbian acceptance is contingent upon the extent to
which our relationships conform to standards of egalitarianism. Second, al-
though they are more likely to be defined now as victims rather than traitors,
heterosexual feminists remain objects of suspicion, for their acceptance de-
pends upon how completely they conceal or renounce heterosexual desire.
Ironically, heterosexual feminists are still made to feel like the movement’s
backsliders by virtue of their proximity to contaminating maleness. Occa-
sionally hostility surfaces, as it did at the 1979 Women Against Pornography
conference when a lesbian separatist denounced Susan Brownmiller as a
“cocksucker.” Brownmiller retaliated by pointing out that her critic “even
dresses like a man.”31 But, with the antipornography movement, cultural
feminism has succeeded in mobilizing feminists regardless of sexual prefer-
ence, however fragile the alliance.
Radical feminists embraced a dualistic approach to sexuality—one which
acknowledged both the danger and the pleasure associated with sexual ex-
ploration for women in this culture. For instance, the popularity of feminist
sex manuals was not believed to undermine the effectiveness of the antirape
movement. While radical feminists recognized that the ideology of the sex-
ual revolution discriminated against women, they did not conclude from
this, as have cultural feminists, that sexual liberation and women’s libera-
tion are mutually exclusive. For instance, in The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith
Firestone argued that “in our new society, humanity could finally revert to
its natural polymorphous sexuality—all forms of sexuality would be allowed
and indulged.”32 In a 1971 article, “Thoughts on Promiscuity,” Karen Lind-
sey claimed that men’s continued acceptance of the sexual double standard
had sabotaged the sexual revolution. Moreover, she warned that:
unless we understand, very exactly, what is at the heart of the failure

in our sexual experimenting, we are, in fact, in danger of reverting to
a rejection of sex without love—with all the self-denial, smugness,
guilt, and dishonesty that goes with such a rejection.33
Radical feminists did not idealize women’s sexual conservatism, but rather
would have agreed with Muriel Dimen that “female sexual turf and male
emotional range need expansion.”34 For instance, Karen Durbin contended
that rock music encouraged female sexual assertion:
Rock music . . . provided me and a lot of women with a channel for

saying, “I want,” for asserting our sexuality without apologies and
without having to pretty up every passion with the traditionally “fem-
inine” desire for true love and marriage, and that was a useful step
toward liberation.35
Radical feminists understood that women’s sexual inhibition is related in

large part to the absence of safe, accessible, and effective contraception, which
renders women sexually vulnerable. They attributed women’s attachment to
traditional morality not to the innately spiritual quality of women’s sexuality,
but rather to our socialization which encourages sexual alienation and guilt.
This consciousness informed the radical feminist struggle for reproductive
rights. Radical feminists understood, as does the New Right, that the fight for
reproductive freedom is the struggle for sexual self-determination.
Of course, from the earliest days of the women’s movement there were
those radical feminists whose views on sexuality anticipated cultural feminist
sexual politics. Ti-Grace Atkinson declared that “all sex is reactionary.”

Dana Densmore suggested that celibacy is preferable to “making love to a
man who despises you.”36 And Abby Rockefeller claimed that “women don’t
like [sex] either with the same frequency or in the same way as men.” (her
italics)37 But these views represented a minority opinion within the ranks of
radical feminists.
However, in some crucial respects radical feminist thinking on sexuali-
ty did contribute to the development of cultural feminist sexual politics.
Radical feminists’ skepticism toward individual solutions disinclined them
from defining “the personal is political” prescriptively. However, this same
wariness encouraged them to trivialize individual attempts toward sexual
empowerment. For instance, two reporters for the feminist newspaper off
our backs criticized NOW’s 1974 Conference on Sexuality for focusing upon
sexual technique rather than political analysis:
Viewing [the conference] from . . . a strictly radical feminist per-

spective . . . we react with anger and disappointment. We went hop-
ing to hear some feminist analyses of women’s sexuality. Instead, we
were inundated with tales of organic masturbation parties, bisexual
chic, and why whips can be fun.38
while radical feminists disparaged personal solutions, they nonethe-

less believed that one’s sexuality should mirror one’s politics—a conviction
that promoted prescriptivism. In their desire to develop a genuinely femi-
nist sexuality, radical feminists subordinated sexuality to politics in what
Deirdre English has suggested is a feminist version of “sexuality in service
to society.”39 Most importantly, by envisioning feminist sexuality as requir-
ing the elimination of power, radical feminism encouraged us to renounce
our sexuality as it is now. In assuming that a liberated sexuality demanded
the disentanglement of power and sexuality, radical feminists, quite unin-
tentionally, contributed to our alienation from psychological and social
sources of sexual power.
On the whole, however, cultural feminist thinking on sexuality repre-
sents a significant deviation from radical feminist sexual politics. In the cul-
tural feminist analysis, sexual danger so defines women’s lives that it pre-
cludes a consideration of sexual pleasure. Unlike radical feminists, who
generally located the source of women’s oppression in the nuclear family,

cultural feminists agree with Andrea Dworkin that “the heart of sex oppres-
sion [is] the use of women as pornography, pornography as what women
are.”40 The argument that “pornography is the theory, rape the practice,”
represents cultural feminism’s contribution to the domino theory of sexual-
ity.41 It identifies pornography as the scourge which leads inexorably to vio-
lence against women. More recently, antipornography feminists have ex-
tended their critique to encompass fantasy, which they claim is dangerous
because it entails the substitution of an illusion for the “social-sexual reali-
ty” of another person. In rejecting as so much “male-identified mind-body
dualism” the belief that fantasy is the repository of our ambivalent and con-
flictual feelings, cultural feminists have developed a highly mechanistic, be-
haviorist analysis that conflates fantasy with reality and pornography with vi-
olence. “Integrity,” their answer to patriarchy’s dangerous dualism, entails
the transformation of all aspects of our lives into one seamless, unambigu-
ous reflection of our politics.42 Such a view assumes that we can and should
be held accountable for our desires. And if we fail to banish those tainted
fantasies, we can console ourselves with Julia Penelope’s suggestion that fan-
tasy may be another “phallocentric ‘need’ from which we are not yet free.”43
Cultural feminists define male and female sexuality as though they were
polar opposites. Male sexuality is driven, irresponsible, genitally oriented,
and potentially lethal. Female sexuality is muted, diffuse, interpersonally-
oriented, and benign. Men crave power and orgasm, while women seek reci-
procity and intimacy. Although cultural feminists often assume the im-
mutability of male and female sexuality, the prescriptivism which permeates
their writing reflects an underlying fear about their mutability. For instance,
in her 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference address, Robin Morgan
warned that lesbian feminists who advocated nonmonogamy, accepted
transvestites, and listened to the Rolling Stones had adopted a “male style
[which] could be a destroyer from within” the women’s movement.44 By
defining the pursuit of relationships as female and the pursuit of sex as male,
Morgan tried to intimidate her lesbian audience back into the familiar ter-
rain of romantic love:
Every woman here knows in her gut the vast differences between
her sexuality and that of any patriarchally trained male’s—gay or
straight . . . that the emphasis on genital sexuality, objectification,

promiscuity, emotional noninvolvement, and coarse invulnerabil-
ity was the male style, and that we, as women, placed greater trust in
love, sensuality, humor, tenderness, commitment. (her italics)45
unlike radical feminists who attacked romantic love, cultural feminists

apotheosize it.46
For cultural feminists, male sexuality is not only compulsive, but, as
Dworkin has described it, “the stuff of murder, not love.”47 Thus, for men,
sexuality and violence are inextricably linked and find their cultural expres-
sion in pornography. Cultural feminists are so convinced that male sexual-
ity is, at its core, lethal, that they reduce it to its most alienated and violent
expressions. The actions of de Sade or Son of Sam come to symbolize the
murderousness of male sexuality, and sexual intercourse becomes a mere
euphemism for rape.48 Liberal and leftist men who oppose censorship are
characterized as having a prurient interest in pornography. And men’s
growing interest in their partner’s sexual satisfaction is said simply to
demonstrate men’s obsession with sexual performance. Everything, no
matter how contradictory, confirms the premise that male sexuality is self-
ish, violent, and woman-hating. Their characterization of male sexuality is
so uniformly unflattering and overwhelmingly bleak that one wonders what
would be accomplished by the restriction or elimination of pornography.49
By contrast, women’s sexuality is assumed to be more spiritual than sex-
ual, and considerably less central to their lives than is sexuality to men’s.
For instance, Adrienne Rich describes female sexuality as an “energy which
is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself.”50
And Ethel Person maintains that “many women have the capacity to abstain
from sex without negative psychological consequences.” For Person,
women’s more highly developed “capacity for abstinence, repression, or
suppression [has] adaptive advantages” over male hypersexuality.51 Person
fails to understand that women’s apparent mental health in the face of
anorgasmia or abstention testifies to women’s conditioning to subordinate
and repress sexual drive. Unfortunately, sexual repression may very well
become adaptive for women once again if the Human Life Amendment and
Family Protection Act are enacted into law.52 In fact, cultural feminism
feeds what one feminist has described as “our society’s treasured illusion
that male sexuality is like a bludgeon or a speeding train,” and its equally
cherished corollary that women seek affection rather than orgasm in their
sexual encounters.53
It follows from this that cultural feminists would see heterosexuality as a
metaphor for male rapaciousness and female victimization. In contrast to
lesbian feminists for whom heterosexuality generally represented collabo-
ration with the enemy, cultural feminists appear to take a more sympathet-
ic position toward heterosexual women. They understand women’s partici-
pation in heterosexuality as more apparent than real, and suggest that
women are coerced and bribed into compliance with heterosexual norms.
For instance, Adrienne Rich cites Barry’s Female Sexual Slavery as evidence
that “for women heterosexuality may not be a ‘preference’ at all but some-
thing that has to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and
maintained by force.”54 Although specific explanations vary, cultural femi-
nists believe that for women heterosexuality is neither fully chosen nor truly
pleasurable. It is worth noting that heterosexual cultural feminists seem to
accept this understanding of their sexuality, although to do so would appear
to involve guilt and self-depreciation, if not self-flagellation.
If the cultural feminist view of heterosexuality is overdetermined, their
position on sexual minorities is myopic. Janice Raymond maintains that
“all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to
an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.”55 The contradiction of
transsexualism is that it both undermines and reinforces gender as a sig-
nificant category. However, cultural feminists, especially those who favor
biological determinism, find transsexualism troubling, because it con-
founds the boundaries between maleness and femaleness. But cultural
feminists’ real contempt is reserved for male-to-female lesbian-feminist
transsexuals who seduce lesbians, they argue, by appealing to their vestigi-
al heterosexuality. Mary Daly complains that their “whole presence be-
comes a ‘member’ invading women’s presence and dividing us once more
from each other.”56
Cultural feminists believe that the centrality of public and anonymous
sex to the gay male sexual landscape merely demonstrates that heterosex-
ual men have no monopoly on sexual callousness. They maintain that the
gay male subculture of s/m and cross-generational sex is further evidence
of male rapacity.57 NOW endorsed this view at its 1980 convention, which
adopted the infamous resolution designed to ensure that NOW not work
with any groups that might misconstrue pornography, s/m, cross-gener-
ational sex, and public sex as “Lesbian Rights issues.”58 Ironically, the
resolution was introduced by the chair of NOW’s Sexual Preference Task
Force.59
How has it come to pass that some lesbians are in the forefront of a
movement which has resurrected terms like “sexual deviance” and “perver-
sion”—terms which one would have thought the feminist movement made
anachronistic a decade ago? Lesbian cultural feminists would, however, ex-
plain, as does Adrienne Rich, that lesbianism is a “profoundly female expe-
rience” which needs to be dissociated from “male homosexual values and
allegiances.”60 Lesbian cultural feminists’ insistence that lesbianism is an
issue of “radical female friendship” rather than sexual preference reflects
an unwillingness to admit that within the larger culture lesbianism is
viewed as a “perversion.”61 For instance, Sally Gearhart suggests that les-
bian sexuality is wholesome:
In being part of the word “gay” weary lesbians have spent untold
hours explaining to Middle America that lesbians do not worry
about venereal disease, do not have sex in public bathrooms . . . and
do not want to go to the barricades fighting for the lowering of the
age of consent.62
Even more, this hostility toward other sexual minorities reflects their
fear that male sexuality as it is symbolized to them in s/m, cross-genera-
tional sex, transsexualism, and pornography is polluting the “women’s
community.” Adrienne Rich maintains that pornography impairs the “po-
tential of loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity.”63
Raymond cautions us against accepting lesbian-feminist male-to-female
transsexuals into our communities, for she fears they might “seduce” us
back into heterosexuality.64 And Gearhart complains:
I am frustrated and angry that . . . many gay men remain totally obliv-
ious to the effect on women of their objectification of each other,
their obsession with youth and beauty, their camped-up con-
sumerism, and their demand for freer sexual expression.65
statements like these betray an apprehension that women’s sexuality

may not be innately ethereal and that lesbianism may not offer the uncom-
plicated refuge from what Rita Mae Brown in 1972 termed the “silly, stupid,
harmful games that men and women play.”66 But rather than acknowledge
that the quest for completely egalitarian relationships and politically-cor-
rect sex has proved difficult at best, lesbian cultural feminists have retreat-
ed from the ambiguities of sexuality and have used ideological justifications
to de-emphasize sex. The growing number of lesbian feminists experi-
menting with s/m, butch-femme roles, and bisexuality only demonstrates
to lesbian cultural feminists that we must be more vigilant in the struggle
against the residual heterosexuality which they believe informs these “devi-
ations.” They see in the growth of the lesbian-feminist sexual fringe the
corrupting influence of male-identified sexuality rather than a rebellion
against the ever-narrowing standard for politically permissible sexuality.67
This admonition that our sexuality mirror our politics may have originat-
ed with radical feminists, but for lesbian cultural feminists it has become the
justification for a destructive sexual prescriptivism. The sexual repressive-
ness of the lesbian cultural feminist orthodoxy has contributed to the hetero-
phobia which is in turn vented in the antipornography movement. Perhaps
the movement’s success in enlisting the support of certain sectors of the les-
bian community reflects the extent to which the movement validates lesbian-
ism through its demonization of maleness and heterosexuality.
For cultural feminists the proliferation of pornography, the apparent
increase in rape and incest, and the growing assertiveness of the sexual
fringe testify to the evils of sexual permissiveness. They indict pornography
for eroding the traditional boundary separating the virgin from the whore.
Morgan argues that pornography has contributed to a “new ‘all women are
really whores’ attitude, thus erasing the last vestige of (even corrupted) re-
spect for women.”68 Although pornography is obviously the focus of their
struggle, cultural feminists believe that the real villain is the sexual revolu-
tion rather than its “propaganda” tool, pornography. Cultural feminists
never seem to consider that the apparent growth in violence against women
might demonstrate the effectiveness of the feminist movement in challeng-
ing the heretofore closeted and uncontested nature of rape, battery, and in-
cest rather than the success of the sexual revolution in promoting these
crimes.69 Instead they maintain that the sexual revolution allowed men to
choose “swinging” over commitment, pornographic images over real peo-

ple, and violence over love.
More importantly, cultural feminists argue that the sexual revolution’s
affirmation of male sexual values encouraged women to abandon female
sexual values in a misguided quest for assimilation. According to Barry, who
here sounds disturbingly like Phyllis Schlafly, many women have rejected
intimacy only to discover that “new problems arose as they escaped from
male power into self-centeredness, and as they tried to depersonalize their
sexual being.”70 Cultural feminists also accuse rampant individualism of
discouraging intimacy by encouraging us to become selfishly absorbed in
meeting our own needs. Barry has even vilified democracy for breeding a
“pluralistic notion of cultural diversity” which in turn encourages a perilous
tolerance toward “sexual perversion.”71 For cultural feminists sexual free-
dom is a reactionary, rather than a subversive, force which secures social
order by numbing us into political apathy.72
This analysis fails to explain why the Reagan administration is more in-
tent upon ushering us back into the sexual repressiveness of the 1950s than
in promoting sexual liberation. This equation of sexual freedom with irre-
sponsibility, selfishness, and dehumanization has, in fact, already been
used by the New Right in its struggle against feminism, abortion, and gay
rights. This analysis further denies the extent to which early radical femi-
nism was a rebellion against traditional sexual morality. The sexual revolu-
tion’s failure to challenge gender asymmetry hardly justifies cultural fem-
inists’ promotion of a traditional sexual standard—albeit modified to
include those lesbians and gay men whose sexuality appears to be ortho-
dox. And by fingering individualism as the enemy, cultural feminism ig-
nores the role individualism played in the emergence of the women’s
movement. Individualism may be bourgeois, but it is precisely the break-
down of a familial orientation and the development of individualism which
gave birth to feminism.73
To curb the promiscuity and rapacity spawned by the sexual revolution,
cultural feminists propose that we impose upon the culture a female sexual
standard—a standard which seems to correspond to their understanding of
their mothers’ sexual values. Thus Morgan argues that in repudiating sexu-
al liberation she is affirming her identification with her mother.74 And
Barry suggests:
In going back into new sexual values we are really going back to the
values women have always attached to sexuality, values that have been
robbed from us, and destroyed as we have been colonized through
both sexual violence and so-called liberation.75
Cultural feminist sexual politics really offer us nothing more than wo-
men’s traditional sexual values disguised as radical feminist sexual values.
Moreover, these values derive not from our biology, as Barry suggests, but
from our powerlessness. In promoting romantic love as an authentically fe-
male and thus feminist sexuality, cultural feminists endorse the same con-
straining sexuality to which our mothers were condemned. Rather than de-
velop a feminist understanding of sexual liberation, cultural feminists reject
it as inherently antifeminist and instead endorse a sexual code which drasti-
cally circumscribes the sorts of sexual expressions considered acceptable.
And, in demanding “respect,” rather than challenging the terms upon which
women are granted “respect,” cultural feminists reinforce the distinction
between the virgin and the whore.
In fact their solution to violence against women is nothing more than a
return to the spurious “respect” traditionally reserved for women. This
analysis confuses “respect” for liberation and fails to recognize that “re-
spect” is merely the flip side of violation. More importantly, this view sug-
gests that sexual repression is a satisfactory solution to violence against
women. Antipornography feminist Diana Russell has admitted that censor-
ship would only push pornography underground, but she reasons this is
preferable to seeing it “flourish as an accepted part of the culture.”76
Cultural feminists seem nostalgic for the old days when men “respect-
ed” some women, women acknowledged that love was female and sex was
male, and pornography was kept behind the counter. Although cultural
feminists blame the sexual revolution for destroying the old sexual order,
radical feminists’ attack on marriage, romantic love, puritan morality, and
respect certainly hastened its downfall. In fact, the cultural feminist analy-
sis of sexuality constitutes an unacknowledged repudiation of radical femi-
nist sexual politics. The radical feminist critiques of the nuclear family,
sexual repression, the State and religion have disappeared from the cultur-
al feminist analysis, which focuses instead upon the “pornographic mind”
and sexual permissiveness. And as we have seen, cultural feminists are in
the process of rehabilitating much of what radical feminists found most op-
pressive to women.
Why do cultural feminists, while recognizing that they cannot eliminate
pornography, continue to define it as the overriding feminist issue? On one
level the antipornography campaign represents a calculated attempt to
unify and fortify a movement seriously divided by the issues of race, class,
and sexual preference and badly demoralized by the antifeminist backlash.
In their desperate efforts to construct a mass women’s movement to combat
male lust, antipornography feminists abandon feminism for female moral
outrage.77 For instance, antipornography activist Judith Bat-Ada insists that
a “coalition of all women . . . regardless of race, color, creed, religion, or po-
litical persuasion” should be formed to fight pornography (emphasis
mine).78 Unfortunately, in advocating sexual repression as a solution to vi-
olence against women, cultural feminists resort to mobilizing women
around their fears rather than their visions.79
On a less obvious level, the antipornography movement’s insistence
upon the incorrigibility of male sexuality suggests that it is concerned with
something other than its reformation. This movement is as much an at-
tempt to regulate female sexuality as it is an effort to curb men’s sexuality.
The movement’s monomaniacal concern with sexual danger, epitomized by
Barry’s claim that “sexual slavery lurks in the corners of every woman’s
life,” and its disinterest in developing strategies for sexual empowerment
discourage women from struggling toward sexual self-definition.80 It has
become a vehicle to establish the proper parameters of lesbian sexuality so
as to diminish the possibility that lesbians will defect to “male-identified”
sexual expressions, whether these be s/m, roles, or heterosexuality. Per-
haps antipornography feminists prefer to foreclose on sexuality rather than
to explore it and to risk discovering the disjuncture between their desires
and their politics.
Although the movement’s villainization of heterosexuality seems to
offer heterosexual feminists very little but self-denial and guilt, it should be
understood that they do achieve a measure of political legitimacy by virtue
of their status as victims of male lust. For lesbian and heterosexual femi-
nists alike, the antipornography crusade functions as the feminist equiva-
lent to the antiabortion movement—reinforcing and validating women’s
sexual alienation and manipulating women’s sense of themselves as the cul-
ture’s victims as well as its moral guardians. The antipornography move-

ment, like the antiabortion movement, represents a rebellion against the
new sexual order. In acknowledging women’s right to sexual pleasure while
ignoring the risks associated with sexual exploration for women, the sexual
revolution has heightened women’s sense of sexual vulnerability.81 But do
we really want to return to the old sexual order whereby women were ac-
corded male protection in exchange for sexual circumspection?
On a more profound level, I suspect that the sexual problematic is relat-
ed to the mother-daughter problematic. The cultural feminist injunction
against “going too far” sexually may also be an injunction against going too
far, or becoming too differentiated, from our mothers. Whereas radical fem-
inism represented a rebellion against the mother in which identification
with the mother was suppressed, cultural feminism represents fusion with
the mother in which differences between mother and daughter are sup-
pressed. Perhaps cultural feminists advise us to embrace our mother’s puta-
tive sexual values because they fear that the sexual empowerment and self-
definition implicit in radical feminism involve a betrayal of our mothers?82
In conclusion, I suggest that we reclaim the radical feminist vision that
joined sexual liberation with women’s liberation. The struggle for sexual
pleasure is legitimate and need not imply a callous disregard of sexual
danger. In order to develop a truly transformative sexual politics we must
once again resist the familiarity of sexual repression and the platitudes
about male and female sexuality. But we must also break with the radical
feminist tradition which encourages us to subordinate sexuality to politics
in an effort to make our sexuality conform to our political ideology, treat-
ing our sexuality as an ugly blemish which with vigilance and time might be
overcome. We must abandon the belief so deeply entrenched in the femi-
nist community that particular sexual expressions are intrinsically liber-
ated or intrinsically degraded. Inequality can exist in relationships where
the lovemaking is assiduously egalitarian as well as in relationships where
the polarized roles of top and bottom are carefully cultivated.83 We should
acknowledge the possibility that power inheres in sexuality rather than as-
sume that power simply withers away in egalitarian relationships. Perhaps
we might achieve more equality were we to negotiate rather than deny
power. The solution is not to reprivatize sexuality or eschew a critical
analysis of sexuality. Nor is our sexuality so hopelessly conditioned that
our efforts to transform it are misguided and futile. Instead we need to devel-
op a feminist understanding of sexuality which is not predicated upon denial
and repression, but which acknowledges the complexities and ambiguities of
sexuality. Above all, we should admit that we know far too little about sexual-
ity to embark upon a crusade to circumscribe it. Rather than foreclose on
sexuality we should identify what conditions will best afford women sexual
autonomy, safety, and pleasure and work toward their realization.
8
Queer Like Us?
I
entered graduate school just as
the reverberations of gay liberation
began to be felt in the academy.
However, in history, a particularly hidebound discipline, the tremors bare-
ly registered. It is no accident that the first substantial effort to write gays
into U.S. history, Gay American History, which appeared in 1976, was written
by an independent scholar, Jonathan Ned Katz.1 The skepticism, even hos-
tility, of many traditional historians toward this new enterprise ensured
that many of the academic historians who pioneered the field were well es-
tablished, or at least tenured. Although gay and lesbian history hasn’t
achieved the mainstream success of women’s history, it is no longer a pari-
ah field. Many colleges and universities now offer courses in lesbian and gay
history and even conventional history journals publish articles in the field.
What follows is not a comprehensive review essay, but rather an effort to
chart the broad trajectory of the field, and explore some of the challenges
that queer theory poses for historians of lesbians and gays.
in 1977 when i began teaching women’s studies, lesbianism was smuggled

into the curriculum under the rubric of “woman-identification.” In our
hands, lesbianism wasn’t a sexual choice (and certainly not an orientation)
but rather a matter of political principle: putting women first, thereby chal-
lenging the patriarchal imperative that women prioritize men. We ignored—
even denied—the connections between lesbians and gay men, whose sexu-
ality lacked such lofty aims and too often smacked of the very power
relations that lesbian-feminism was refusing. When the issue of role-play-
ing lesbians came up, as it inevitably did among women’s studies students
eager to pounce on any and all inconsistencies, we took evasive action. We
admitted that older lesbians sometimes did adopt butch and femme roles,
but we ventured that male-identified roles would go the way of patriarchy it-
self—vanquished to the dustbin of history. We offered lesbian-feminists as
models of liberated androgyny and hoped that Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s
groundbreaking article “The Female World of Love and Ritual” would help
get students past their squeamishness about lesbianism.2 Smith-Rosen-
berg’s 1975 essay, which revisioned the Victorian period as a time when
passionate romantic friendships between women were considered com-
pletely normal and unremarkable, was powerful ammunition in our strug-
gle to normalize lesbianism.
Undergraduates usually were won over by the wholesomeness of these
Victorian ladies, but they were nonetheless perplexed by the murkiness of
their sexuality. What did those love letters between them mean? And why
did they sometimes dislodge their husbands from their beds and sleep in-
stead with their girlfriends? Smith-Rosenberg admonished readers not to
ask whether these women had sex together because “theirs was an entirely
different construction of sexuality from ours, sensuous not genital,” but, as
Christine Stansell observed, this is precisely the question that gets lodged
in just about every reader’s brain.3 Smith-Rosenberg’s cheeky article ad-
vanced the then-radical idea that sexuality isn’t a timeless essence, that it
changes over time. Even more, she found nothing wrong with the fact that
the Victorian era inhibited heterosexual leanings rather than homosocial
ties. Go girls! was the intoxicating subtext of the piece.
At first the difficulties of educating undergraduates about lesbianism
convinced me that de-emphasizing sexuality as Smith-Rosenberg had was
probably not a bad idea, pedagogically speaking. But almost immediately I
began to question its utility for scholars outside of the classroom. Smith-
Rosenberg’s essay had much to recommend it—for one, she took these rela-
tionships and “private” life seriously—but it was also problematic, particu-
larly her claim that the Victorian sexual landscape afforded people
considerable latitude in moving across the spectrum from heterosexuality
to homosexuality. Although she demonstrated that homosocial relation-
ships were commonplace and accepted, she didn’t prove that the same tol-
erance was accorded homosexual relationships. But, then, the entire essay
had a hyperbolic, even infatuated, quality to it. It was not only a great time
to be homosexual, apparently it was also a swell time to be female. Smith-
Queer Like Us? 131
Rosenberg went so far as to argue that these passionate friendships proved

that women “did not form an isolated and oppressed subcategory” in nine-
teenth-century America.4 Why, I wondered, wasn’t it possible that these
women both enjoyed intense relationships with one another and were still
oppressed? What of the feminist complaint, put forward most eloquently by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that this world was, at bottom, claustrophobic, stulti-
fying, even deadening? In the end, I suspected that female intimacy was tol-
erated because of the repressiveness of the Victorian gender system—in other
words, because women had virtually no other options outside of marriage.5
Blanche Wiesen Cook’s 1979 article “The Historical Denial of Lesbian-
ism” made Smith-Rosenberg’s work seem a model of circumspection.
Cook, who went on to write an important and acclaimed two-volume biog-
raphy of Eleanor Roosevelt, argued here that historians shouldn’t base their
determination of lesbianism on whether a woman defined herself as a les-
bian or whether she had sex with another woman. Why, she asked, were his-
torians of women-loving-women required to find “genital proofs” of les-
bianism when the same standard of evidence was not required when
studying heterosexuals.6 No one doubted that Dwight D. Eisenhower and his
friend Kay Summersby were heterosexual, she pointed out, although they
didn’t “consummate” their love.7 For Cook, historians’ obstinate insistence
that women not be named lesbian without some evidence that they were
sexually drawn to other women was an intolerable erasure of lesbian histo-
ry. Her solution: redefine lesbianism so that “women who love women, who
choose women to nurture and support and to create a living environment in
which to work creatively and independently are [seen as] lesbians.”8 To that
end, she declared Hull House founder Jane Addams a lesbian, a controver-
sial move for sure.
In her influential essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Ex-
istence” lesbian poet Adrienne Rich went even further than Cook. Rich
not only attacked the heterosexist underpinnings of much feminist schol-
arship, she argued that were it not for the coerciveness of patriarchy, ho-
mosexuality, not heterosexuality, would be the norm among women. Like
Cook, Rich redefined lesbianism as a political act: female solidarity. And
just as Cooke named all kinds of women lesbian, so did Rich characterize
a number of women writers and fictional characters—from Virginia
Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia to Toni Morrison’s Sula—as part of what she
called the “lesbian continuum,” which she defined as “a range—through

each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experi-
ence.” Rich wanted to embrace more “forms of primary intensity between
and among women” than the term lesbianism suggested. However, when
confronted with actually existing lesbian and bisexual women, Rich was
sometimes less than enthusiastic. She judged bisexual writer Colette a
“far less reliable source on lesbian existence” than Charlotte Brontë,” on
the grounds that Colette was male-identified whereas Brontë was woman-
identified.9
The effort to expand the definition of lesbianism resulted in an ironic
elision: by the early eighties, lesbian history was devoid of self-identified,
sexually active lesbians. Scholars who understood their own lesbianism as
an outgrowth of their feminism (and leading lesbian scholar Lillian Fader-
man went so far as to argue that lesbianism was not primarily a sexual phe-
nomenon) were in no hurry to claim women whose lesbianism was unam-
biguously and unabashedly sexual. In fact, the emergence of modern
lesbian identity in the early twentieth century was characterized by some
scholars, most notably Faderman in Surpassing the Love of Men, as a tragedy
in which medical professionals stigmatized women’s romantic friendships
and made them over into perversion. The “medical discourse” may have
made lesbian identity possible—by naming what had been previously invis-
ible, even unimaginable—but at a terrible cost, argued Faderman, because
romantic friendships between women acquired a “new outlaw status.”10
Thankfully, the absence of real live lesbians from lesbian history didn’t
continue much longer. The feminist Sex Wars of the early eighties helped
bring about a shift away from the desexualized, woman-identified-woman
model of lesbianism by encouraging a reconsideration of feminism, sexual-
ity and power.11 Joan Nestle, Amber Hollibaugh, Esther Newton, and Cher-
rie Moraga, all of whom contributed to the revisionism about butch and
femme roles, took part in the Barnard Conference of 1984, where they and
others advanced the then-controversial idea that playing with power and
difference in the bedroom could be sexy rather than oppressive. In the field
of lesbian history the impact of the Sex Wars was remarkable, in part be-
cause those fighting for a reconsideration of roles also had class on their
side; correctly or not, butch-femme was understood to be a largely work-
ing-class phenomenon.12
Queer Like Us? 133
Indeed, it wasn’t the Sex Wars, but the desire to represent the lives of
working-class lesbians, that led Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis to
write about butch and femme lesbians of post-World War II Buffalo, New
York.13 With the publication of their 1986 article, women for whom lust,
not friendship, was paramount took center stage in lesbian history. Esther
Newton’s mid-eighties effort to rehabilitate Radclyffe Hall and her man-
nish lesbianism was critical to this shift as well.14 Newton maintained that
Hall, whose 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness remained for decades the
best-known book about lesbianism, had taken up the medical discourse of
homosexuality as gender inversion in large measure because she longed to
escape the asexual model of Victorian romantic friendship. The inversion
model at least explained to Hall her desire to take another woman. Other
scholars have questioned the influence that these doctors had upon gay
people. Jennifer Terry, George Chauncey, and Lisa Duggan have chal-
lenged the idea that medical professionals single-handedly invented the
homosexual. In a provocative “against-the-grain” reading of psychiatric
case histories, Terry revealed that homosexual research subjects often re-
sisted their interrogators’ pathologizing assumptions.15 In his account of
a homosexual scandal that rocked the Navy in World War I-era Newport,
Rhode Island, Chauncey found that as late as the 1920s the medical dis-
course still played no significant role in the formation of working-class
homosexual identities.16 Drawing on Terry’s against-the-grain approach,
Duggan argued that the figure of the mannish lesbian had no single
source. Rather it was created through mass circulation newspapers’ lurid
accounts of women’s passionate relationships, which were then appropri-
ated by doctors as “cases,” and subsequently reworked by women them-
selves into “identities.”17
During this period—roughly the 1970s and 1980s—considerable re-
search was also being done on the history of male homosexuality. The lead-
ing historians of male homosexuality were deeply influenced by feminist
critiques of gender and heterosexuality. However, the organization and
visibility of male homosexual behavior and the existence of police and
court records documenting it made for histories that were much more fo-
cused on sex than those produced by historians of lesbians. Just as histori-
ans of lesbians initially avoided butch and femme lesbians, historians of
gay men were sometimes reluctant to explore the role of effeminacy in
male homosexuality, not, however, because they were made uneasy by gay
men’s outlaw status, or, to be more accurate, the outlaw status of gay sex.
The evidence of male homosexual contacts dating back to the ancient
Greeks raised very early on the question of whether acts are equivalent to
identity. Following French theorist Michel Foucault, who had maintained
that homosexuality, like heterosexuality, was a social invention, not the re-
sult of genes or hormones, many gay male historians argued that although
men probably had sex with one another from time immemorial, homosex-
ual identity—the idea that the act carries with it a particular type of person-
ality or identity—is distinctly modern, emerging as recently as the nine-
teenth century. Classicist David Halperin, for one, argued that ancient
Greek society, which many gay men had celebrated for its apparent accept-
ance of homosexuality, was really a culture where a “phallic sexuality of pen-
etration and domination” that was age- and power-based held sway. The
Greeks sanctioned sex between men and boys, citizens and noncitizens, he
argued, but in no way condoned or even understood the idea of reciprocal
erotic desire among males—the hallmark of modern homosexuality. Like-
wise, historian Randolph Trumbach argued that the 18th-century London
subculture of effeminate sodomites should not be seen as some early ver-
sion of modern homosexuality but rather as a fundamentally different sex-
ual system in which effeminacy figured as much as homosexual desire in the
making of identity. Although there were exceptions, historians of male ho-
mosexuality were often critical of the notion that gay history should be about
searching history for replicas of ourselves, or the idea so popular in the gay
and lesbian community that we’ve always existed in history, what John
D’Emilio calls the myth of the “eternal homosexual.”
The early nineties saw the publication of two landmark studies, George
Chauncey’s Gay New York and Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis’s Boots
of Leather, Slippers of Gold.18 Chauncey’s massive, encyclopedic book sets out
to do for gay history what C. Vann Woodward’s slim, but pathbreaking, 1955
book The Strange Career of Jim Crow did for the history of race in the South.
Woodward argued that, contrary to public opinion, segregation, or Jim
Crow, was not one of the South’s “immutable folkways.”19 In fact, the “stiff
conformity and fanatical rigidity” with which the South pursued segregation
from the turn of the century through the early years of the civil rights move-
ment did not occur immediately in the aftermath of Reconstruction, but
Queer Like Us? 135
took a good twenty years to cohere.20 Similarly, Chauncey debunks the pre-
vailing view that homophobia is a timeless feature of American society. He
demolishes the so-called “Stonewall narrative,” the standard story line
which assumes that until the famous Stonewall uprising of 1969 gay men
were lonely and self-loathing, isolated from one another and utterly invis-
ible to heterosexuals. Instead, he finds that gay men of New York were more
visible, more tolerated, and more integrated into society in the early years
of the twentieth century than they were at mid-century. Gay New York un-
covers the richness and vitality of homosexual life in the early twentieth
century, but what makes this book truly dazzling to historians (if not always
to the undergraduates who have to slog through all the detail) is the way in
which Chauncey embeds gay history in American social history, everything
from immigration and labor history to gender history and the history of
popular culture.
Like other recent social histories, Gay New York also challenges the pre-
sumption that the middle class was more enlightened about sex than the
working class. In fact, he proves that among much of the immigrant work-
ing class, men often “alternated between female and male partners without
believing that interest in one precluded interest in the other,” or that occa-
sional sex with effeminate men branded one homosexual or bisexual. For
men, in other words, gender normativity was not contingent upon exclusive
heterosexuality. Chauncey maintains that the hetero-homosexual binarism
with which we live today emerged within the middle class. Here his expla-
nation for the shifting paradigm, the turn-of-the-century crisis in middle-
class masculinity, has a certain deus-ex-machina quality to it. He never
proves that concerns about the feminization and overcivilization of Ameri-
can middle-class men actually led those men to try to get a leg over working-
class men by changing the rules of the game so that “normal” masculinity
became contingent upon exclusive heterosexuality.
Chauncey clearly favors the older working-class model of sexuality, and
students often rhapsodize about the fluidity of this sexual system that per-
mits a man to be a man even when he is fucking a fairy. More discerning stu-
dents sometimes wonder if Chauncey’s own enthusiasm for this largely de-
funct sexual system may have led him to exaggerate the extent of
working-class tolerance toward gay men.21 Prevalence doesn’t equal toler-
ance.22 They also ask whether the active-passive model of sexuality is really
any better than the hetero-homo binarism that supplanted it. After all, the
only people permitted much latitude in the working-class paradigm were the
“normal” men who didn’t identify as fairies. For Chauncey, though, the
emergence of the hetero-homo binarism is problematic because it leads to
the ghettoization and invisibility of male homosexuals. However, the
straight-gay dichotomy was also critical to the consolidation of homosexual
identity and community, which, as others have noted, was, after all, a neces-
sary precondition for homosexual activism.23
Just as Chauncey is enamored of the working-class fairies of gay New York,
so Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis are taken with the tough, beer-
drinking, barfly butches who dominate Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold. But
while Chauncey has big ambitions—to upend the standard understanding and
periodization of gay history and to write gays into American social history—
Kennedy and Davis set themselves the more modest goal of chronicling Buf-
falo’s butch-femme bar culture. There’s another striking difference. While
Gay New York is chock full of stories about anonymous public sexual encoun-
ters and virtually silent on the topic of relationships, Boots of Leather concerns
itself with lesbians’ intimate relationships, while also documenting, in some
cases, sexual practices. This reflects long-standing (and now eroding) differ-
ences in the sexual cultures of gay men and lesbians, but it also speaks to the
evidence these scholars used. Chauncey relied on DA’s case files, court
records, the papers of state and city liquor licensing agencies, antivice com-
mission reports, and to a much lesser extent, diaries, letters, and oral histo-
ries. By contrast, Kennedy and Davis based their study almost entirely on ex-
tensive oral histories with forty-five women, or “narrators,” the majority of
whom are white, working-class butches who entered the bar community in
the 1950s. Students often complain that while Chauncey’s study succeeds in
mapping the “sexual topography” of gay New York, it fails to reveal very much
about the individuals who made up this world.24 Of course, this is typical of
social history, which by relying on public records, rarely manages to convey
the psychological complexity of those ordinary people whose lives it seeks to
uncover. By contrast, Kennedy and Davis manage to get their narrators to re-
veal highly personal, even painful, parts of their lives. It makes for a riveting,
often illuminating, read.
Kennedy and Davis argue that butch-femme culture was a way of organ-
izing lesbian desire, making it visible. Perhaps even more crucially, butch-
Queer Like Us? 137
femme was about organizing a “stable culture of resistance,” especially in

the 1950s as the larger culture grew more repressive.25 Butches protected
and expanded lesbian space and asserted lesbian visibility. Kennedy and
Davis also point to the ways in which butch-femme roles both mimed and
transformed heterosexuality. Whereas heterosexuality was organized
around male pleasure, butches were, if anything, in the traditionally female
role, focused on giving their femmes pleasure. And while male privilege
permeated heterosexual relationships, butches derived no socially sanc-
tioned privileges from dressing like men. In fact, their masculine appear-
ance often spelled chronic underemployment and unemployment, with the
result that femmes were generally the more reliable breadwinners. More-
over, the everyday harassment of butch women meant that in some ways
butches led more circumscribed lives than their femmes, who could “pass”
as straight.
In their starched white shirts and men’s pants, and with their slick-
backed DAs, these women took real risks in announcing their “queerness”
at a time when hyperdomesticity stigmatized anyone who wasn’t married.
Yet they were sometimes cruel, tyrannical, and violent. Story after story in
Boots of Leather details the alcohol abuse, and the oppressive, sometimes vi-
olent, ways in which butches tried to control their femmes. There’s a
strange dissonance here between the narrators’ sometimes chilling stories
and the authors’ upbeat evaluations of these relationships, the majority of
which they argue were characterized by “caring and closeness.”26 They even
judge the butch-femme sexual system “woman-centered and sex-positive”
despite the extent of butch “untouchability.”27 Kennedy and Davis do ac-
knowledge that the unwillingness of many butches to be made love to sug-
gests an underlying ambivalence about their femaleness. They even note
that the butch performance ethic could become burdensome to the butch
and frustrating to the femme who could feel sexually disempowered by it.
However, none of this affects their evaluation of the community, which re-
mains curiously rosy. But what if this butch-femme culture that was so ef-
fective at declaring lesbian desire and building community was, in other re-
spects, dysfunctional? What if the paranoia, possessiveness, and violence of
butches inhered in this erotic system, which established butches as the true
lesbians and femmes as their unreliable objects of desire, always in need of
surveillance? Part of the problem may be that in Boots of Leather sexuality is
primarily understood as subservient to community. Kennedy and Davis

seem to favor a kind of functionalism that roots sexual customs in the
preservation of the lesbian community, and not desire in all its disturbing
and chaotic splendor.
Until recently, most work in gay and lesbian history has focused, in the
manner of Gay New York and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, on either gay
men or lesbians. Gay men do turn up in Kennedy and Davis’s study, but they
are shadowy figures at best.28 And Chauncey comes right out and declares
that the differences in lesbian and gay history and the complexities of each
make it “virtually impossible” to write a joint history that doesn’t render one
group’s history an “appendage” to the other’s.29 Many factors came togeth-
er to produce what has been from the beginning a very bifurcated field.
Adrienne Rich spoke for many lesbian scholars when she argued in 1980
that lesbianism should be treated as a “profoundly female” experience. She
cited numerous differences between the two groups, including the preva-
lence of ageism and anonymous sex among gay men and their defense of
pederasty.30 Of course, gay men’s greater economic and political power,
their access to the public sphere, and their sense of sexual entitlement have
made their history in many respects strikingly different from that of les-
bians. While historians of male homosexuality have been struggling to dis-
cover when desire for sex with other men became the basis of homosexual
identity, historians of lesbians have asked when the desire for intimacy with
other women became sexualized and a basis for lesbian identity.31
In the last ten years, though, gay and lesbian historians have shown
more willingness to think about the ways that the two halves of this field are
related. Critical to this shift were the feminist Sex Wars, which by empha-
sizing the centrality of sex to lesbianism, undermined much of the ideolog-
ical insistence on the distinctiveness of lesbianism. If lesbians were moti-
vated by lust, too, then might these groups share more common ground
than previously supposed? Of course, the AIDS crisis and the activism it
provoked also brought about stronger ties between lesbian and gay activists,
which affected the scholarship as well. Two recent books, Martin Duber-
man’s Stonewall and Esther Newton’s Cherry Grove, Fire Island, reflect this
shift.32 The riots at the Stonewall Inn, a seedy, Mafia-owned dive in the
heart of New York’s Greenwich Village, have come to symbolize the birth of
the modern gay rights movement. Duberman’s approach—to include oral
Queer Like Us? 139
histories of two lesbians alongside those of three gay men and one transves-
tite—seems token. Neither Yvonne Flowers or Karla Jay were part of the
Stonewall’s scene, nor did they have much to do with the emerging gay lib-
eration movement. In the end, their stories feel tangential, except insofar as
they underscore the sexism of the gay movement. If Stonewall was “the em-
blematic event in modern lesbian and gay history,” as Duberman asserts, we
need to know more than we learn in this book about its consequences for
lesbians.33 Esther Newton’s effort to write an inclusive history works better
in large part because her book is about a bohemian community whose ini-
tial organizing principle was eccentricity rather than sexual identity. New-
ton’s book is a brief for what she calls the Grove’s “camp/theatrical” sensi-
bility, which in its flamboyance and aversion to politics is worlds apart from
the self-seriousness and “restraint” of the “egalitarian/authentic” sensibil-
ity—a mode she associates with the gay rights movement.34 Newton’s fond-
ness for campy theatrical queers reflects in part her frustration with the gay
and lesbian movement’s sometimes prissy rejection of butches and drag
queens. By focusing on fairies and butches, all these nineties books stand as
a rebuke of sorts to the modern gay movement, which sometimes has
shunned those on its margins, the stigma bearers.35
It’s likely that future research will turn up more connections between gay
men and lesbians, especially in the demimonde world where gay men mixed
with female prostitutes, or as they were sometimes called “gay women.” Al-
though the term “gay” referred to their immorality and flamboyance rather
than to their sexual identity, lesbianism was not unheard of among prosti-
tutes, even in the early part of the twentieth century.36 But gay men and les-
bians socialized together outside red-light districts as well. Both Boots of
Leather, Slippers of Gold and the wonderful Canadian film, Forbidden Love, sug-
gest that upwardly mobile lesbians and gay men relied upon each other to get
into the “right” bars and clubs and to ward off suspicions of sexual deviance,
especially when the police were an issue. But relationships between gay men
and women may have been less strategic, too. There is some evidence that
lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men mixed easily in the beatnik enclaves of San
Francisco’s North Beach and on the Lower East Side of New York.37 I also
wonder about the extent of heterosexual experimentation in these commu-
nities, especially in the years before lesbians and gay men felt more pressure
to define themselves as exclusively homosexual.38
If scholars do begin writing more inclusive histories it will probably be

in part because of the meteoric rise of queer theory/studies within the
academy, especially in the humanities where poststructuralism paved its
way.39 Queer theory calls into question the conditions by which binary op-
positions (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual) are produced. It also
claims to undermine all kinds of borders, not just those dividing lesbians
from gay men, but those that separate queers from all manner of “de-
viants”—a point to which I will return. Indeed, if queer studies influences
the direction of gay and lesbian history, it could throw open the field of
historical inquiry to include virtually anyone whose sexuality troubles the
“regimes of the normal.”40 Just as queer activism has tried, if somewhat
fitfully, to build a politics based on affiliation rather than identity, so queer
theory, which contests the idea of sexual identity as a stable and coherent
category, has positioned itself as anti-identitarian. The point isn’t to re-
cover gay and lesbian history, according to queer studies, but instead to
look at the process whereby heteronormativity and deviance are construct-
ed and contested. (And in another important departure from gay and les-
bian history, which focused on the recovery of gay experience, queer the-
ory, following Foucault, is concerned with the discursive practices which it
believes shape subjectivity and experience. It’s through the study of cultu-
ral production and the sexual meanings inscribed within them that one can
explore “real” lives and communities.) Queer theory doesn’t require that
its subjects be self-consciously gay; nor does it demand that their primary
identification be gay, a requirement that often has peripheralized racial
and ethnic minorities for whom sexual identity is usually not the sole
defining characteristic. In fact, queer theory doesn’t demand that its sub-
jects be gay or lesbian at all, which is not surprising given that the father of
queer theory, Foucault, maintained that “pleasure has no passport, no
identification papers.”41
The effort to move beyond the study of self-identified gays and lesbians
is long overdue. The requirement that our subjects be “gay through and
through”—Kennedy and Davis’s chosen formula, and one that Kennedy ad-
mits skewed their study in favor of butches—is far too exclusionary.42 It as-
sumes a level of sexual absolutism or purity that rarely comes with the ter-
ritory of sexuality. This queer turn away from coherent and fixed identity
could encourage the inclusion of those who have been left out or have been
Queer Like Us? 141
on the margins of our histories: femmes, trade (heterosexually identified

men who had sex with men, sometimes for money), female prostitutes, and
probably the largest category of all: heterosexually married people who en-
gage in queer sex and/or relationships.
Some queer theorists also challenge the focus on community that has
characterized both gay and lesbian activism and history. Michael Warner
argues that the paradigm of community works in relation to racial and eth-
nic groups, but fails to describe gays and lesbians whose history has so
much to do with “noncommunity.” For Warner, community is an especial-
ly inappropriate model because “nearly every lesbian or gay remembers
being such before entering a collectively identified space.”43 Not only that,
queers typically spend their childhoods in isolation, apart from communi-
ty. This early alienation, this sense of not belonging, isn’t a liability, in his
view, but an advantage because it encourages a critical stance toward “the
normalization of behavior.”44 Lesbian and gay scholars may want to re-
think the centrality of community to their work, but not because Warner’s
critique is especially persuasive. His contention that gay history consists of
noncommunity—read isolation—seems debatable in light of Chauncey’s
findings in Gay New York. Tellingly, gay men in the early part of the twenti-
eth century didn’t speak of coming out of the closet, but rather of coming out
into homosexual society—a camp expression that referred, of course, to a
debutante’s coming-out party. In fact, the metaphor of the closet didn’t
even come into use until the 1960s.45 Warner also assumes that there’s a
uniformity to queer experience—surprising in a leading exponent of queer
theory, which is supposed to take difference as its starting point.46 What of
all those people, women in particular, who feel their queerness only later
in life or who feel it only dimly or fleetingly in childhood? And does the
awareness of queerness inevitably result in isolation? It seems likely that
the isolation and alienation Warner associates with queerness is more typ-
ical of effeminate boys than tomboy girls.47
Whether in the political or academic arena, queerness involves a cri-
tique of normalization. Queerness is about claiming, not denying, the
charge of perversion, and it means affiliating with others on the sexual
fringe—transvestites and the transgendered, married men who have furtive
homosexual sex in public restrooms, sex workers, and maybe even man-boy
lovers.48 According to queer theory, we shouldn’t be distancing ourselves
from those whose sexuality seems unknowable or unassimilable to our un-

derstanding of gayness; rather, we should be making them central to the
project of queering history. Anyone who troubles, or queers, the project of
gay and lesbian history should be embraced, even as unsavory a character as
Harry Thaw, the turn-of-the-century celebrity murderer, s/m enthusiast
and occasional lover of boys, whom Martha Umphrey calls a “swindler of
lesbian/gay history—one who catches us off guard, then slips away.”49 I
share Umphrey’s desire to broaden the parameters of gay and lesbian his-
tory. However, I wonder if the new queer formulation won’t bring about its
own exclusions, or at the very least create a kind of hierarchy of perversion
whereby the weirdest are anointed the queerest.50 Even before the ascen-
dance of queer theory, gay and lesbian historians were focusing on butches
and fairies to the exclusion of most others. Queer theory’s embrace of the
non-normative could exacerbate this skewing of the field. A queered histo-
ry can take as its subjects “sexual outlaws” and focus on “instability and
scandal,” as Umphrey has proposed, but we don’t want to lose sight of more
conventional gays and lesbians who on the surface appear to pose less of a
challenge to regimes of the normal.51
Nor would we want a queer history that elided lesbianism. Yet much
queer theory—such as Michael Warner’s theorizing on queer childhood,
which ascribes to lesbians experiences that seem more specific to men—
purports to be inclusive, but is distressingly gender blind.52 When queer
theorists do acknowledge differences in the experiences of gay men and les-
bians, they sometimes do so in a way that marginalizes women. For exam-
ple, in her groundbreaking work on the representation of homosexual de-
sire, Eve Sedgwick has focused exclusively on men because of the “relatively
continuous relation of female homosocial and homosexual bonds,” which
she argues stands in contrast to the “radically discontinuous relation of
male homosocial and homosexual bonds.” Indeed, Sedgwick goes so far as
to argue that desire between women is “of no great consequence; it is no
source of conflict or contradiction.”53 As Teresa de Lauretis has pointed out,
by implying that “sex and desire don’t really matter or present problems for
women” in the way that they do for men, Sedgwick ends up “denying les-
bianism altogether.”54 Ironically, Sedgwick’s argument for the continuity
between female homosociality and homosexuality echoes the work of Adri-
enne Rich and other seventies revisionists, but in a way that reinforces the
Queer Like Us? 143
erasure of lesbianism. While I see much more conflict and contradiction in

lesbianism than does Sedgwick, I do wonder if queer theory’s concern with
the non-normative doesn’t unintentionally privilege the experiences of
men, who historically have had much greater freedom than women to trans-
gress society’s sexual borderlines.
Although this privileging of the sexual fringe has not yet become prob-
lematic in historical studies, it has begun to bedevil the political arena,
where queer politicos sometimes position themselves as the big nose-
thumb, or fuck-off, to gay and lesbian activists of the 1970s and 1980s. As
Donna Penn ruefully notes, the queer turn is producing a “problematic re-
visionism” whereby gay and lesbian anything is dismissed as “assimilation-
ist, accommodationist, mainstream, conservative, and ‘retro.”’55 The repu-
diation of the conventional, or vanilla, and elevation of the non-normative
or “bad,” proved especially troubling at a 1997 meeting of Sex Panic, a group
of queer scholars and activists who came together to oppose the closing of
gay bathhouses and to mount a challenge to the alleged sexual conservatism
of several prominent gay writers. In an odd display of fourth-grade insult-
flinging, fliers for the meeting named Larry Kramer, Michelangelo Signo-
rile, Gabriel Rotello, and Andrew Sullivan neoconservative “turdz.” Sex
Panic, whose members include queer theorists Michael Warner and Dou-
glas Crimp, attacked as gay positive but sex negative this disparate group of
writers who had been hectoring the gay male community to change its ways:
to turn its back on sex clubs and bathhouses and to come out for monogamy
and marriage.56 Although Warner has said that support for “sexual culture”
doesn’t entail opposition to intimacy and monogamy, that’s not the way it
played out at the meeting. During the question-and-answer period, a mem-
ber of the audience got up and declared that he was “what is known under
Megan’s Law as a sexually dangerous predator.” He spoke of having been
jailed for four years for having sex with underage boys and of now being
shadowed by the police. The audience, according to journalist Caleb Crain,
greeted him with a “stunned and respectful silence.” Yet when another man
nervously suggested that the gay community’s “celebration of multipartner
sex” made it harder for him to maintain a long-term monogamous relation-
ship, the crowd interrupted and heckled him.57
How the pendulum swings! Twenty years ago Lillian Faderman was de-
crying lesbianism’s “outlaw status,” and today the pervert outlaw is all the
rage—at least in queer circles. We saw the first glimpses of this during the
feminist Sex Wars when nonkinky sex was sometimes disparaged as “vanil-
la.” This turning of the tables, the reversal of the culture’s hegemonic val-
ues, is typical of political movements, at least those rooted in identity poli-
tics. But, then, queer theory claims to have gone beyond identity politics
and to be skeptical of efforts to invest sex with meaning, to encumber it with
notions of authenticity and liberation. However, in the end, it seems that for
all of us, even those dissatisfied with identity politics, meaning just sticks to
sex. Not even the sophisticated arguments of queer theorists can undo that.
I don’t want to return to those days when lesbian historians were satisfied
with romantic friendships and tried their best to make lesbianism re-
spectable, even wholesome. However, all the recent efforts to “queer” ho-
mosexuality have made me wonder if we haven’t lost sight of how unsettling
heterosexuals often find “normal” gays. Maybe it’s time to consider that as
unsettling as straight Americans find our mannish women and effeminate
men, that they may be as terrified by gays and lesbians who appear to be just
like them.
9
“Thousands of Men and
a Few Hundred Women”: Janis Joplin,
Sexual Ambiguity, and Bohemia
I
n discussions of janis joplin’s
sexuality, numbers always seem to
come up as if they’ll resolve once
and for all that knotty question: What was she? On at least one occasion,
when a Bay Area underground newspaper published an article claiming she
was gay, Joplin herself deployed numbers to set the record straight. Joplin
was backstage, drunk, and between sets at a San Diego gig when she heard
the news. “You fly up there tomorrow,” she yelled at the friend who’d shown
her the offending article, “and tell this bitch that Janis has slept with thou-
sands of men and a few hundred women.”1
It’s a great story that captures Joplin’s irreverence, bravado, and fond-
ness for hyperbole. Some would say it demonstrates her queerness, too.
Joplin’s sexual scorecard does tell us quite a lot about her feelings toward
her own unruly desires. Joplin didn’t deny she had slept with women.
Rather, she emphasized the preponderance of her heterosexual home runs
as if that would prove that she wasn’t gay. Joplin made a point of trumpeting
the Babe Ruthian dimensions of her heterosexual lust, especially to the
press, even going so far as to have Rolling Stone notified of her one-night
stand with football star Joe Namath. For much of her life, even before she
was a celebrity, Joplin was involved in a relentless and frenzied pursuit of
“cute guys.”
Internalized homophobia may have been driving Joplin’s much-
publicized pursuit of men, but her interest in men was not simply a
hypercorrection or a mere contrivance. Kim Chappell, who was lovers
with both folksinger Joan Baez and Joplin’s sometime lover Peggy Caserta,
was a part of the Haight scene. Chappell, who is now an out lesbian, called
herself bisexual then and slept with men as well as women. Today she
describes her bisexuality as a “joke.” However, when asked if Joplin’s in-

terest in men was faked as well, Chappell said, “God, I don’t know. She
sure did like guys.”2
Joplin has a reputation as the sixties grooviest, most liberated chick—a
woman who knew what she wanted and went after all of it, unencumbered by
guilt or self-doubt. Of course, that’s the reputation she wanted, the one she
crafted. In Queer Noises, British rock critic John Gill proclaims Joplin “queer
as fuck a quarter of a century before either the term or the political statement
became fashionable.” In his account, Joplin emerges a proud and pioneering
queer without “any qualms about her lesbian feelings.”3 Gill’s portrait is
drawn from Ellis Amburn’s lurid 1992 biography, Pearl: The Obsessions and
Passions of Janis Joplin. From his line of questioning, it’s clear that Amburn
was hoping to prove that Joplin was really a lesbian. He finds some ammuni-
tion in Peggy Caserta’s 1973 kiss-and-tell memoir, Going Down with Janis.
Caserta’s book opens with the memorable line, “I was stark naked, stoned out
of my mind on heroin, and the girl lying between my legs giving me head was
Janis Joplin.” However, Caserta doesn’t depict Joplin as exclusively lesbian.4
In fact, her book features plenty of heterosexual sex and three-ways with men.
The idea that Joplin is a poster child of lesbianism or queerness is a nice
fantasy, but that’s all it is. Her great ambivalent retort about sleeping with
thousands of guys and a few hundred women was never reported in the
press. While many of her friends knew her sexuality was more complicated
than her heterosexual facade suggested, her lesbian affairs went unreport-
ed until a year after her fatal OD, when Village Voice columnist and lesbian
provocateur Jill Johnston claimed that the rock star had really been gay.5
Joplin wasn’t heterosexual, but efforts to make her over into a lesbian or
queer icon always miss the mark. Something always get airbrushed out of
the picture. Marjorie Garber’s portrait of the “very bisexual” Joplin is a case
in point. She ascribes to Joplin a level of openness—even calculation—about
her “bisexuality” that the singer never exhibited. Garber maintains that
Joplin, like fellow rockers David Bowie and Mick Jagger, staged, or per-
formed, her bisexuality, which she argues was an “important part of the
mechanism of stardom” for all three performers.6 But Joplin couldn’t have
been more different from glam rockers Bowie and Jagger. Onstage Joplin
emphasized the authenticity of her feelings, while glitter boys Jagger and
Bowie favored camp theatrics and provocative posing. Moreover, as anyone
“Thousands of Men and a Few Hundred Women” 147
who has ever seen footage of Joplin in concert knows, she would have been
hard-pressed to stage her bisexuality because she was surrounded by male
musicians when she performed.7 In truth, if Joplin was performing any-
thing but a song onstage, it was heterosexuality.
This judgment may be hard for some to accept, particularly those who
quite understandably have come to confuse Joplin with Melissa Etheridge,
the rocker who has presented herself as Joplin’s cleaned-up spiritual
daughter. Etheridge not only performs Joplin songs in concert, until re-
cently she was slated to play her in a Hollywood movie that her girlfriend,
Julie Cypher, is producing. In her induction speech for the Texas-born
singer at the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, Etheridge wished
Joplin were still alive, “making a comeback . . . being a women’s-rights ad-
vocate or a gay-rights advocate, fighting against AIDS and intolerance.”8
Joplin may or may not have lent her name to those political struggles, but
one thing’s for sure: Joplin and Etheridge share little besides big voices and
a certain ballsy self-presentation. In truth, Etheridge’s temperament ap-
pears to be a lot sunnier and her sexuality considerably more straightfor-
ward than her idol’s. Joplin was a sexual adventurer, for sure—the first
woman at the University of Texas to go braless—but like many sixties rebels,
she bore the scars of having grown up in the fifties. It troubled Joplin that
she didn’t want to marry, have kids, and be part of the house-with-the-
white-picket-fence American dream. Sometimes she convinced herself she
wanted nothing more than to settle down with a guy.
Of course, it’s Joplin’s remarkable rebelliousness, not her lifelong
struggle with conventionality, that people remember. To many, Joplin’s ap-
parent sexual openness reveals not only how liberated she was, but how free
the sixties were. However, at the very moment that the sexual revolution was
apparently sweeping the country, merely holding hands or dancing togeth-
er was risky business for gays and lesbians. Even in New York City, and as
late as 1969, a man could be arrested for dancing with another man. Green-
wich Village has long enjoyed a reputation as a gay mecca, but until 1969 the
politically progressive Village Voice refused to carry ads that contained the
word “gay.”
Nor did the counterculture offer any real respite from the homophobia of
mainstream America. The common perception is that the hippie countercul-
ture of Haight-Ashbury broke virtually every sexual taboo, but it didn’t.
Long-haired hippie men did pioneer an androgynous look that challenged

traditional notions of masculinity, and the hippie rhetoric of free love did
bring lots of gays to San Francisco. However, gays who came to the Bay Area
expecting to find a queer-friendly environment quickly discovered the
Haight wasn’t what they had imagined. Indeed, when hippie entrepreneurs
opened up a rock ballroom in the Haight they named it the Straight Theater
as an in-joke to convey its hipness and, more important, to advertise that it
was now a straight space, so that the gay men who were accustomed to com-
ing there to watch porno flics would stay away.9 “The homosexual thing was
very separate, and it was taboo even in that scene,” recalls Joplin’s friend and
band mate Dave Getz.10 Joplin’s lover Peggy Caserta agrees. “The hippies
were straight kids,” she insists.11
In fact, in this respect the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury stood in
contrast to beatnik North Beach, which in many ways had been queer-in-
flected. But, then, the counterculture was a mass movement and as such
shared more with the dominant culture than had the tiny Beat subculture of
the fifties and early sixties. The Beats deliberately transgressed America’s
sexual (and racial) borders, and many of the best-known Beat writers,
most notably Allen Ginsberg, wrote openly homoerotic work. Poet Diane
Di Prima remembers going “to bed with whatever we went to bed with—
male, female, whatever.”12 The Beats’ sexual openness owed something to
the fact that both bohemians and gays were underground, barely visible to
straight America. Maria Damon notes that in bars like the San Remo in
Greenwich Village and the Anxious Asp in North Beach, Beat and gay sub-
cultures “overlapped in sometimes uneasy and sometimes mutually sup-
portive proximity.”13 To Allen Ginsberg’s friend Carl Soloman, the Beat
world was so queer it almost felt like “you needed apostles of heterosexu-
ality in those days.”14
In the early-to-mid sixties, Joplin was very much a part of the fading
beatnik scene of San Francisco’s North Beach and New York’s Lower East
Side.15 She had a relationship with an African-American lesbian for almost
a year, and she counted among her friends many gay men and lesbians.
Later, she lived in what one friend calls an “infamous gay rooming house of
transvestites.”16 Even after beatnik North Beach was eclipsed by hippie
Haight-Ashbury and she became America’s first hippie pin-up chick,
Joplin often described herself as an unreconstructed beatnik. And yet once
“Thousands of Men and a Few Hundred Women” 149
her North Beach days were over, Joplin had little contact with the gay com-
munity, although she was intermittently involved with Peggy Caserta for
two-and-a-half years.
people often ask if Joplin would have become a lesbian had she not OD’d
in October 1970. Would gay liberation, by challenging the stigmatization of
homosexuality, have permitted Joplin to “own” her lesbian feelings? Even
Myra Friedman, who emphasized the predominance of Joplin’s heterosex-
ual relationships in her biography of the singer, has more recently suggest-
ed that Joplin might have “opted for a gay lifestyle” had she lived to feel the
effects of gay liberation.17 Anything is possible, of course, but the picture
gets very fuzzy for me when I try to imagine Janis Joplin sitting through a
Holly Near concert. Even if she had decided she was gay, it’s a foregone con-
clusion that Joplin would have found Lesbian Nation, with all its diligent
policing of desire, a pretty dreary place.
Rather than ask if Joplin would have come out in the seventies, perhaps
we should ask what the world might have looked like had the countercul-
ture appropriated more than the marijuana and Zen Buddhism of beatnik
culture. What if hippie culture had been, like that of the Beats, more gay
inflected? Would the gay and lesbian liberation movement have made
membership contingent upon exclusive homosexuality had the new bo-
hemia of the sixties been more gay friendly? And would Joplin’s life have
played out differently had the hippie scene not been so aggressively het-
erosexual and had the lesbian community not become more condemnato-
ry of sex with men?
I was first prompted to ask these questions by novelist Edmund White’s
musings on Marjorie Garber’s book about bisexuality, Vice Versa.18 Writing
some twenty-five years after Stonewall, White wonders whether he might
have continued having relationships with both men and women had gay lib-
eration not intervened and encouraged him to reinvent himself as exclu-
sively homosexual. Declaring himself unambiguously gay was, he now
thinks, his way of putting an end to his sexual ambivalence. Certainly
Stonewall made the beatnik elevation of sexual fluidity and indeterminacy
seem like an evasion, a cop-out. The idea that sex is neither right or wrong,
but just is, didn’t sit well with gay liberation’s insistence that homosexuali-
ty was transformative, even liberatory, that “gay is good.”19
When I started working on my biography of Janis Joplin I was so weary of

the gay and lesbian community’s preoccupation with consolidating and reg-
ulating sexual identity that I found it difficult not to romanticize the pre-
gay-liberationist approach to sexuality. I still agree with Foucault that
pleasure “passes from one individual to another,” rather than being “se-
creted by identity,” but five years of studying Joplin and the beatnik and
hippie subcultures in which she moved have somewhat tempered my enthu-
siasm for those pre-Stonewall years.20 While it’s true that gay liberation
closed down sexual possibilities for some, as Edmund White has suggested,
the movement also opened up possibilities for others. For someone like
Kim Chappell, whose bisexuality had been a fiction, Stonewall made possi-
ble greater sexual honesty.
Gay and lesbian liberation’s faith in the stability and fixity of sexual
identity feels shopworn today, however, the effort to label and fix identity
has had its uses. After all, it’s worth remembering poet Allen Ginsberg’s
comments upon surveying the partially cleaned up Stonewall Inn the week-
end after the 1969 riot. “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten
years ago,” Ginsberg observed of the bar’s patrons. The riots had trans-
formed them, even made them “beautiful.”21 Gay liberation was transfor-
mative, double-edged though it was. As for Joplin, as appealing as her sex-
uality might appear, her fixation on finding one good man, and her
relentless heterosexual boasting, suggest that she was no stranger to sexual
confusion and shame. The very indeterminancy of Joplin’s sexuality—that
she was beyond straight or gay—seems the epitome of queerness today, but
we shouldn’t confuse her sexual fluidity with queer nonchalance.
10
Gender Disobedience, Academia, and
Popular Culture
D
es pi te t h e h y p e , g e n de r-
bending isn’t an invention of
the late twentieth century. Peo-
ple have been playing and messing with gender for years. Take the case of
Murray Hall, a woman who passed as a man for twenty-five years and be-
came a Tammany Hall power broker during the 1880s and ’90s. Or Babe
Bean, the “Trousered Puzzle,” who served as a lieutenant during the Span-
ish-American War and lived most of her sixty-six years as a man. Stranger,
still, is Lord Cornbury, the first colonial governor of New York, who came
from England decked out as a woman and remained so for the duration of
his term. Better known are the Native American berdache, men who lived as
women and sometimes married men.
Now, however, more people seem to be crossing the line than ever be-
fore. And most curious of all, Americans can’t seem to get enough of all this
kinkiness. The Republicans may have captured Congress, but the transgen-
dered seem to have hijacked the airwaves, or, at least the world of TV talk
shows. These days, the transgendered are literally just a channel away.
Of course, the public’s fascination with all this queerness may not signal
a greater tolerance for gender ambiguity. After all, the studio audience on
TV talk shows often functions as a kind of superego, reacting with such ab-
horrence that one thinks lions would be kinder. But not always. For in-
stance, recently when a transgendered man (female-to-male, or FTM) ex-
plained that he had decided to forego phalloplasty because “you don’t have
to have a penis to be a man,” the predominantly female audience went wild
cheering him on. Queer nation, indeed!
For the last five years bending, subverting, or exploding gender have
had a hold on the academic imagination as well. It wasn’t always so trendy.
During the ’60s and ’70s the academic discourse on transsexuals (then the
preferred term) was dominated by psychologists and sociologists who pro-
duced resolutely clinical books that were usually pathologizing in effect if
not intent. It was, for example, simply an article of faith among sexologists
that the problem lay with the transsexuals, transvestites, and drag queens
they studied, not society.
Although sexologists monopolized the field, the ’70s did witness the
publication of two feminist books, anthropologist Esther Newton’s 1972
jewel of an ethnography, Mother Camp: Female Impersonation in America1 and
Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire.2 At a time when many feminists
dismissed drag as woman-hating, Newton emphasized the way in which
drag called into question the naturalness of gender roles. Newton’s think-
ing about drag prefigured current postmodernist theorizing about it, but
Mother Camp had little impact when it first appeared or when it was repub-
lished seven years later.
By contrast, Raymond’s 1979 screed carried endorsements from three of
feminism’s then-reigning divas—Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, and Robin
Morgan. The Transsexual Empire epitomizes the sort of paranoid feminism
that passed for radical in the late seventies. Raymond advanced the truly
bizarre idea that “all [MTF] transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing
the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.”
Worst of all, she claimed, were the MTF’s who became lesbians in order to
“become the man within the woman, and more, within the women’s com-
munity.” On the brink of Reagan’s election, Raymond wrote as if the great-
est threat facing feminists was MTF lesbians, not the right wing.
If transsexuals were the bogeyman for Raymond, many other feminists
targeted pornography. As the feminist antiporn movement took shape,
every sexual expression short of side-by-side, nothing-much-happening
lesbian sex became fair game. Promiscuous and anonymous gay male sex,
butch-femme, sadomasochism, drag, transsexualism, penetration (read:
heterosexuality), and of course getting off on pornography—all were seen as
symptoms of patriarchal conditioning, or in the lingo of the day false con-
sciousness. In this climate thoughtful reappraisals of drag or anything else
not focused relentlessly on the horror and danger of sexuality for women,
were unlikely. So it went until 1982’s Barnard conference on sexuality,
which opened up the possibility, finally, that one could develop a compli-
Gender Disobedience, Academia, and Popular Culture 153
cated understanding of sexuality, one that didn’t create hierarchies of good

(feminist) and bad (patriarchal) sex.
Postmodern theorizing was not the driving force behind Barnard, but by
1982 po-mo was making inroads into many academic disciplines. If
Barnard enabled a reconsideration of transvestitism and transsexualism,
then the cultural capital enjoyed by poststructuralism provided the cachet.
By the late ’80s, anything gender-bending was on the way up the cultural es-
calator. Drag became the ideal vehicle for revealing the constructedness of
gender, or what philosopher Judith Butler called its “performativity.” No
one was more responsible for putting drag on the academic map than But-
ler, whose Gender Trouble3 was one of 1991’s most hyped academic books. “In
imitating gender,” she contended, “drag implicitly reveals the imitative
structure of gender itself—and its contingency.” In contrast to many ’70s
feminists who had denounced butch-femme as hopelessly mimetic of het-
erosexuality, Butler suggested these roles simultaneously evoke and dis-
place heterosexual conventions. But Gender Trouble really anointed drag as
the prototypical example of gender performativity. The choice made sense
given her conviction that “gender is an impersonation.” Gender is perfor-
mative, but it’s not, according to Butler, reducible to style, as popularizers
of her work often assume. One cannot, Butler has since argued, change
one’s gender at will. Rather “performativity is about repetition, very often
with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to
resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that
one is inevitably in.”4
One reason feminist and po-mo scholars initially shied away from the
transgendered community was its very embeddedness, some would say
complicity, in the gender system. Although the transgendered denaturalize
gender by pointing to the disjuncture between biological sex and gender
identity, they have also confirmed naturalized notions of gender by posing
the problem as the “wrong body.” Psychological and sociological studies,
and, until recently, even transsexual memoirs have emphasized the con-
ventionality of transsexuals’ thinking about gender.
In 1991’s Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity,5 Sandy
Stone argued that transsexuals’ well-documented conventionality follows
in large measure from the ideology of gender reassignment clinics. There
doctors evaluated candidates for surgery on the basis of how well they
“performed” the gender of choice. Stone pointed out that when the first
candidates were evaluated, researchers were struck by how well their be-
havior corresponded with the criteria developed by Harry Benjamin,
whose The Transsexual Phenomenon was the researchers’ standard refer-
ence text. Several years passed before doctors discovered why their
clients’ profiles so closely matched Benjamin’s. It turns out that transsex-
uals circulated dog-eared copies of Benjamin’s book within their own
communities. Pre-op transsexuals were “only too happy” to play by Ben-
jamin’s rules because there lay the path to surgery.
Sandy Stone and Kate Bornstein, both MTF lesbians, and, not coinci-
dentally perhaps, po-mo academics, represent a new wave among the trans-
gendered. Instead of craving acceptance as women, they want to live on the
borderlands of gender, outside the familiar masculine/feminine binary.
Bornstein, a self-described “former-man and not-quite woman” and au-
thor of last year’s Gender Outlaw,6 describes the transgendered person as a
“trickster” whose performance of gender undermines the category itself. In
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety,7 Marjorie Garber pres-
ents transsexualism as “one distinctly twentieth-century manifestation of
cross-dressing.” She attributes the cultural fascination with transsexualism
to the “fear and desire of the borderline and of technology.” In Garber’s
hands, cross-dressing becomes a way to explore the “category crisis”—the
breakdown of “definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes perme-
able, that permits . . . border crossings from one apparently distinct catego-
ry to another.”
Predictably, I suppose, at the very moment poststructuralist and feminist
scholars are embracing the meltdown of definitional distinctions and arguing
for the very constructedness of such naturalized categories as gender, sexual-
ity, and race, others in the academy are charting a very different course. If
gender-bending is all the rage among many literary critics, film theorists, an-
thropologists, and historians, there has emerged among scientists and social
scientists a parallel but opposing discourse, one which purports to establish
that there are essential, and presumably intractable, differences between
men and women, gays and straights, and blacks and whites. There’s the search
for a “gay gene,” Simon Levay’s hypothalamus research, Charles Murray and
the late Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve,8 and the recent claim about dif-
ferences in male and female brain functioning. (The recent scientific finding
Gender Disobedience, Academia, and Popular Culture 155
that race has no biological basis is an important exception.) No single motive

unites these researchers. Nor are all of them intent upon shoring up gender
and sexual hierarchies, or the color line. But the current category crisis—
which isn’t so much the result of poststructuralism as it is the work of its twin,
postmodernization (deindustrialization, the rise of multinationals, and new
technologies)—makes this research fairly irresistible to those longing for a
return to the old order. Of course, as technology further confounds gender
differences (at work and in cyberspace, for example) the certainty of the body
seems ever less recoverable.
In 1964, Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which
helped jump-start the sixties of legend, urged his fellow students to stop the
system by putting their bodies upon its gears and wheels, “upon all [its] ap-
paratus.” This was soon reduced to the exhortation, “put your body on the
line.” Bell-bottoms, tie dye, acid rock—all seem, sadly, more plausible
today than the idea that individuals might be able to affect the course of his-
tory through collective action.
If today’s po-mo intellectuals are preoccupied with the civil disobedi-
ence of the ’90s—gender and sexual disobedience, especially as it’s played
out in popular culture—it’s in large part because this is the only game in
town given the collapse of the left, the pervasive perception of feminism and
civil rights as “special interest groups,” and the mass indifference to all
things political. Although this protest is expressed in popular culture far
more than on the barricades, it’s not without some significance. Bikini-clad
supermodel Cindi Crawford shaving a cross-dressed k.d. lang on the cover
of Vanity Fair, the late Kurt Cobain French-kissing fellow band member
Chris Novoselic before thousands of fans—these interventions confound
the culture and will confound Republican efforts to re-Victorianize Ameri-
can society as well. Confounding gender can be subversive, but it doesn’t
signal some sort of post-gendered consciousness. After all, even “gender
outlaw” Bornstein says she’s “real glad” she opted for vaginoplasty. To par-
aphrase Marx, people may make gender, but they are most surely not free to
make it any way they want. But in screwing up the great machinery of sex and
gender, these efforts to “work the trap” of gender—these protests that are
written on the body—at least expand the realm of possibility.
Part 3
Turn the Beat Around
I have always loved popular music, but I didn’t begin writing about it
until the mid-nineties when I was researching Janis Joplin’s life and
doing a lot of freelance writing. As a sixties historian I had already
come to feel that most histories of that period had given short shrift to
popular culture, which was in part how I’d come to write about Joplin.
My cultural turn corresponded to the rise of cultural studies, an inter-
disciplinary field that began making waves in American universities in
the late 1980s. The idea that popular culture can be transgressive and
empowering—a key proposition in much of this work—has proven es-
pecially appealing in this period when mass-based political protest has
sometimes seemed a thing of the past. I was influenced by a number of
cultural studies theorists, including Eric Lott and George Lipsitz,
whose work I discuss in “White Faces, Black Masks,” a piece that was
published in the Village Voice in 1994. Much of the work in this field,
however, elevates culture at the expense of everything else, particular-
ly politics. Thus, the popularity of Cole Porter’s music is said to prove
the queerness of American culture in the 1930s, despite the fact that
ample research has shown that it was anything but a swell time for gays.
This privileging of cultural politics has raised hackles inside the acad-
emy, but even the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik has groused, “Cultural
politics aren’t politics.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but the idea that
slain rapper Tupac Shakur “is the closest thing to a revolutionary we
have had,” as one hip-hop writer recently claimed, is a sad commen-
tary on the current confusion between politics and culture.
In the end my writing was probably as influenced by the music sec-
tions of the Village Voice and the L.A. Weekly as all those hefty cultural
studies readers that were de rigueur in the nineties. In 1994 the L.A.
158 turn the beat around
Weekly published “Ball of Confusion,” my first effort to make sense of

the disco wars of the late seventies. Both my thinking and the world of
popular music had changed too much to reprint that essay here, so last
year I wrote a much more substantial article, “Shaky Ground: Popular
Music in the Disco Years,” for this collection.
This section also includes interviews with Joni Mitchell, John Paul
Hammond, and Lenny Kravitz. It was sheer fan enthusiasm that made
me want to interview Joni Mitchell. When I learned she was coming out
with a CD in late 1994 I thought she might be more amenable than
usual to doing an interview, which turned out to be right. “The Soul of
a Martian: A Conversation with Joni Mitchell” originally appeared in
the L.A. Weekly under a different title. In the intervening years,
Mitchell has found herself in “the right place,” getting all kinds of
awards and kudos. She nabbed a Grammy for 1994’s Turbulent Indigo,
was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, and received
strong reviews for Both Sides Now, her recent collection of standards.
Bluesman John Paul Hammond interested me because his ap-
proach to the blues was so different from Janis Joplin’s. He plays faith-
ful renditions of the blues whereas Joplin was intent on using the songs
to tell her own story. The son of a legendary music producer, Ham-
mond has a fascinating history, which I relate in “The Refuge of the
Lions’ Den,” a piece that was published in the L.A. Weekly in 1995. I
have never been wild about Lenny Kravitz’s music, so when MTV Online
asked me to write a feature piece about him I hesitated before accept-
ing the assignment. However, Kravitz had a lot to say about race and
rock music and his childhood years. As different as these musicians
are, their stories help illuminate how individual lived experience both
confounds one’s culture and history and partakes of it. Think of Joni
Mitchell, who resists and succumbs to the conventions of good-girl
femininity. Or Lenny Kravitz, whose music subverts the idea that
music can be racially categorized and yet, when accused of being insuf-
ficiently “black,” resorts to those very categories. Or John Paul Ham-
mond, whose music challenges the idea that only downtrodden
African-Americans can play the blues, but only by taking on, facsimile
style, the voice and playing style of the blues masters.
11
“Shaky Ground”:
Popular Music in the Disco Years
Beat is getting stronger
W
hen sly and the family stone
Music’s getting longer too. hit the stage at Woodstock few
Sly and the Family Stone, could resist their call to “dance
“Dance to the Music,” 1968 to the music.” The band was so pumped up,
especially its leader Sly Stone. With his bushy
Afro, white space-cowboy jumpsuit, and huge
aviator glasses, Sly “kicked ass,” in the words of rock impresario Bill Graham.1
It was a killer performance reminiscent of Otis Redding’s triumph at Mon-
terey Pop just two years earlier in 1967. Neither festival had managed to at-
tract more than a few black artists, and of them only Otis and Sly had a sub-
stantial following among young blacks. But Otis’s music was straight-ahead
Southern soul, while Sly’s sound was “a whole new thing,” as he liked to say.
“I Want to Take You Higher,” for example, had echoes of James Brown and
Booker T. and the MGs, but it also owed a debt to Jimi Hendrix, free-form jazz,
and San Francisco acid rock. “You can’t figure out the bag I’m in,” he boasted
in “Everyday People,” a song that, like most of the band’s singles, soared to
number one on both the R&B and pop charts.2 “You really don’t know which
way he’s taking it,” said singer Jerry Butler, who marveled at the way Sly mixed
it up—”black, white, electric, and unamplified.”3
Sly’s funky music sounded thrillingly bent, edgy, and at first even a lit-
tle ragged. He did it all with a wink and a nod, a mischievousness conveyed
by none of the other leading soul men of the day. And though he was playful,
Sly wasn’t clownish. If the sarcasm of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf
Agin)” sailed right past most white listeners, there was no missing the
meaning of “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” or that of his hit single “Stand,”
in which Sly admonished his audience for “sitting much too long.” Along
with Curtis Mayfield and James Brown, Sly helped make possible more
overtly political soul music such as Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” and
Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”4 Sly was R&B’s first auteur, the one
whose chart-topping success, with albums, not just singles, allowed Wonder
and Gaye to take control of their music.
Sly not only rewrote the rules of soul music, he made almost anything
seem possible. And as the sixties came to a close, the fantasy of limitless
possibility was nearly as irresistible as his music. A lot had happened since
the Summer of Love when Otis had wowed the white crowd at Monterey,
not the least of which was a growing pessimism about realizing the dream
of black and white together. But Sly’s hybridity, coupled with the infec-
tious optimism of his music, suggested we were a family, not opposing
tribes, a perception underscored by the band itself, a multiracial group in
which the women actually played their instruments rather than just
singing back-up. Other sixties artists—Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, for
example—confounded easy generalizations about “black” and “white”
music, but Sly was the one artist whose recombinant music appealed
equally to blacks and whites. Hendrix was “too way out” for most blacks, as
funk maestro George Clinton observed, but Sly managed to “bridge the gap
between Jimi and the Temptations.”5
Yet a decade after Sly played Woodstock, the color line in popular music
had reemerged and felt nearly as solid as the days before Chuck Berry and
Little Richard broke through it.6 When Prince, whose own experiments in
musical miscegenation owed so much to Sly’s, opened for the Rolling Stones
in 1981 at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the audience taunted him with racist
slurs and threw garbage at him and his band. What made this especially cu-
rious is that the Stones had always toured with black musicians—everyone
from B.B. King and Stevie Wonder to Ike and Tina Turner—without incident.7
So how did we get from the late ’60s when the white rock community
embraced Sly’s funky music to the late ’70s and early ’80s when a significant
portion of the white rock audience turned its back on virtually all contem-
porary R&B? How did rock and roll, which had broken the color line in ’50s
popular music, come to shore it up again? Many factors contributed to
rock’s racial retrenchment, but nothing polarized popular music more than
the incredible disco tsunami of the 1970s. With its plush orchestration, ex-
tended instrumental breaks, throwaway lyrics, and that instantly recogniz-
able 4/4 thump, disco music was both immensely popular and deeply de-
“Shaky Ground”: Popular Music in the Disco Years 161
spised, and it changed the racial realities of American popular music in the
’70s and ’80s.
Skirmishes broke out everywhere, but especially on the dance floor,
around the juke box and the radio, and wherever people came together to
party.8 Of course, if disco had remained a minority taste it never would have
inspired such a vicious backlash. But disco’s Blob-like takeover of popular
music was unprecedented. Within four years disco went from being an un-
derground secret to a mass (marketed) phenomenon. And after the run-
away success of 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, disco was ubiquitous, in-
escapable.9 The film’s soundtrack remained the most successful record in
the history of pop music until 1983 when Michael Jackson’s Thriller de-
throned it. By 1978, 40 percent of all singles and albums on Billboard’s Hot
100 were disco tunes.10 The following year, two hundred radio stations na-
tionwide had adopted an all-disco format, including two 24-hour stations
in Los Angeles.11 At disco’s peak, there were twenty thousand discos across
America, generating six billion dollars annually.12 And they were every-
where, including just about every cheesy motel with a bar and a mirror ball.
Suddenly all sorts of improbable people from the Rolling Stones to Ethel
Merman were trying to cash in on the disco craze, and everything from
Beethoven’s Fifth to the theme from Star Wars was getting disco-ized. What
little cachet disco once had, it lost. By 1979 there was no escaping the back-
lash. A year later disco crashed. Record labels scrambled to dump their
disco divisions, and radio stations switched to other formats. The Grammy
Award category for Best Disco Recording, which was hastily established for
the 1979 ceremony (and won by Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”), was
junked after only one year.13
Discophobia proved remarkably durable, remaining a feature of our cul-
tural landscape until the mid-nineties. As late as 1993, the Bee Gees, a band
on the skids until disco made them superstars, said that they would like to
dress up their monster disco hit “Stayin’ Alive” in a “white suit and gold
chains, and set it on fire.”14 Disco artists or those whose work drew on the
maligned genre could count on being disparaged by music reviewers and
rockers alike. For years, Madonna was scorned by critics, who considered
her nothing more than a “little disco tart,” as she put it.15 In the early ’90s
urban contemporary stations that played R&B and hip-hop sometimes pro-
grammed disco . . . as an April Fool’s Day joke.
Disco quietly enacted its revenge; it didn’t die, it was renamed “dance
music,” and over the years it has spawned house, techno, industrial, trance,
and subgenres of those. The biggest-selling music among white teens today
isn’t rock, but rap, a genre that wouldn’t have existed without disco, which
pioneered outsized beats and the splintering and remaking of songs. With the
resurgence of dance tracks, even classic disco has been rehabilitated. Since
the mid-’90s urban contemporary stations have taken to programming disco
oldies all the time, not as a once-a-year prank. Even some rockers who
bashed disco now claim a fondness for it. Johnny Lydon (aka Rotten) former-
ly of the punk group the Sex Pistols, recently admitted that he had always loved
disco.16 “Once mocked for being shallow and synthetic,” disco, notes rock
critic Jon Pareles, “has turned into roots music.”17 Indeed, compared to the
chart-topping teeny-bop dance music of the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, and
Britney Spears—much of it masterminded by black producers, songwriters,
and managers—seventies disco sounds almost lo-tech, even un-processed.18
Nevertheless, it’s taken twenty years for people to grow nostalgic about
disco. So why is it that, long after disco was declared dead, it remained the
great embarrassment of post-World War II popular culture? Cultural critic
Walter Hughes asks a somewhat different question, “Why did [disco’s] scat-
tered intellectual champions arise so much more slowly than with other pop
idioms associated with dancing, sex, and African Americans—jazz, rock and
roll, reggae, rap?” Some would say the music was so patently awful that its
trashing requires no further explanation. But the intensity and persistence
of discophobia suggests that it was motivated by something more than the
music itself. After all, for every execrable disco tune like “Fly, Robin, Fly,”
there was an equally wretched rock hit like “We Are the Champions.” Hugh-
es contends that homophobia is the reason disco remained for so long lodged
at the bottom of our cultural escalator. Certainly disco flourished in the gay
community and was inseparable from the growing visibility of gay men in
urban areas. And, as Hughes points out, the criticisms of disco and the gay
male urban subculture that arose coterminously with it were almost inter-
changeable. Disco was “mindless,” “repetitive,” “synthetic,” and “commer-
cial,” and the gay men who danced to it were “trivial,” “indistinguishable,”
“unnatural,” and “decadent.”
Antigay prejudice played a critical role in discophobia, but so did race.
Indeed, by the end of the seventies disco had come to be seen by many white
rock ’n’ roll’ers as “an ugly amalgam of gay and black music.”19 There was an
undeniably racist quality to the attacks on disco, as rock critic Lester Bangs
discovered. Detroit-born Bangs was no fan of disco, but he was nonetheless
dismayed to discover that to much of New York’s punk hipoisie—the staff of
Punk magazine and the inner circle of musicians at CBGB’s—classic ’60s
soul, even Otis Redding’s music, was “disco nigger shit.”20 Disco brought
out the racism of mainstream rock ’n’ roll’ers, too. When Rolling Stone ca-
pitulated to pressure from advertisers and reluctantly featured disco, once
in 1975 and again in 1979, the magazine received “decidedly racist” mail
from angry readers, even though its coverage was “halfhearted” at best.21
Rock deejays bashed disco, and their stations routinely sponsored popular
“Disco Sucks” campaigns. The most spectacular incident of discophobia oc-
curred in July 1979 when a Chicago rock radio station sponsored a “Disco
Sucks” night before a baseball game at Comiskey Park, a white enclave in the
middle of a black ghetto. As deejay Steve Dahl detonated a ton of disco
records in center field, thousands of white teenagers rushed the field, caus-
ing such pandemonium that the Chicago White Sox had to forfeit the game
to the Detroit Tigers.22
Today disco has become everybody’s music, but in the late ’70s disco was
associated with racial and sexual minorities—outsiders to the world of ’70s
rock. Explaining Rolling Stone’s hostility to disco, one critic there admitted
that “it was something that existed outside of the rock & roll population that
we belonged to personally. . . . It was a different audience, blacks and gays
and women.”23 (The idea that women, plenty of whom considered them-
selves rock ’n’ roll insiders, could be dismissed as part of this “different au-
dience” underscores just how unself-consciously sexist rock ’n’ roll was un-
til recently.) White rockers’ antagonism toward disco mirrored the anger
and alienation many white leftists felt as the Movement of the sixties un-
raveled and splintered into many movements—black power, gay rights, and
feminism. Just as many white lefty men felt themselves shoved to the side-
lines by women, ethnic minorities, and gays, many rock fans believed disco
was taking over, possibly even supplanting, rock.
To a great extent, the backlash against disco was specific to the ’70s, and,
as others have argued, reflected white male anxieties about displacement—
both economic and cultural. Disco’s popularity coincided with stagflation—
a peculiar and unprecedented combination of stagnation and inflation—and
deindustrialization, a process that had begun decades earlier but wasn’t

fully felt until the ’70s when whole areas of the Northeast and Midwest
turned rust belt. The economic downturn happened against a backdrop of
affirmative action and school busing—civil rights measures that provoked
sometimes fierce white resistance, especially among working-class whites,
who saw themselves on the frontlines of change and feared being surpassed
by upwardly mobile blacks. Feminism and gay liberation also threatened to
turn the world upside down in the ’70s. The early success of the Equal Rights
Amendment, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, and the re-
fusal of gays to stay in the closet sparked the growth of an insurgent conser-
vative movement. By the mid-seventies, feminists and gays could claim im-
portant victories (including the election of a number of openly gay officials
such as Harvey Milk), but the ERA was dead, abortion was besieged, Anita
Bryant was spearheading an antigay movement in Dade County, Florida, and
the Briggs initiative, which prohibited gays and lesbians from teaching in
public schools, was on the ballot in California.
Despite these setbacks the fear of displacement was acute, and it could
cut across ideological lines. Even politically progressive heterosexual white
men who deplored the resurgence of conservatism sometimes harbored
ambivalent feelings about the new movements—women’s and gay liberation
and Black Power—which had challenged their hegemony in the larger Move-
ment of the 1960s. Having felt shoved to the sidelines once before, they
were not ready to roll over and let disco edge out their music, at least not
without a fight.
But it wasn’t always crude racism, sexism, or homophobia that fueled the
disco backlash. After all, black musicians, critics, and audiences were di-
vided about the merits of disco. And plenty of gays preferred rock ’n’ roll or
opera to disco. For that matter, many disco-bashing rock critics had been
friendly to R&B in the ’60s and would embrace rap in the ’80s. Although
disco did provoke a racist response, the racial politics of disco aren’t easily
untangled. Disco grew out of R&B, and its leading stars were African Amer-
ican, but it refused many of the qualities of classic soul music, so much so
that some listeners thought the new music sounded “white,” a perception
fueled by the number of white artists who jumped on the disco bandwagon
in 1979.24 In fact, disco’s popularity with pop listeners owed a great deal to
the way it mainstreamed blackness by rendering artists’ color incidental,
almost irrelevant. Disco’s apparent racelessness allowed it to cross over

with the white pop audience, but it alienated many white devotees of the
blues and classic R&B. “What happened to the soul?” asked Rolling Stone
Keith Richards, who deplored all the high-tech button-pushing in R&B.25
In some ways, the history of ’70s R&B is a tale of white expectations of
black soulfulness and African Americans’ refusal. Telling the story of disco
and discophobia requires looking at the way rock music was constructed by
promoters, radio programmers, and those ideological gatekeepers, the crit-
ics. It involves exploring the evolution of soul music and the complicated
racial and sexual politics that surround it. It also requires returning to the
’60s because, Sly Stone’s success notwithstanding, R&B and rock were al-
ready diverging by the late ’60s.
top 40 am radio offered no hint of this growing racial divide. Top 40 was
committed to playing the hits, and by 1967 its deejays moved easily between
artists as diverse as the Supremes, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles,
and the Beach Boys. But when rock moved onto the FM band, there
emerged a very different style and philosophy. FM had been the home of
classical music and educational programming. That began to change in
1967 when San Francisco’s KMPX started broadcasting what came to be
called progressive free-form rock. Within two years most decent-sized
cities had a tiny station broadcasting the same sort of eclectic music mix.
The pioneers of FM free-form radio saw themselves as creating a liberated
space where deejays would follow their own personal aesthetic rather than
a tight playlist driven by the station’s bottom line. They were fiercely anti-
commercial; if Top 40 played it, they wouldn’t. As a result, free-form dee-
jays played the records of black artists like Miles Davis and Muddy Waters
but ignored popular R&B songs, particularly the Motown hits that were such
staples of AM radio.26
The exclusion of most popular soul artists was not motivated by racism; in
fact, most of the people who worked at these early free-form radio stations
were antiestablishment.27 It’s just that, like almost everyone in the develop-
ing rock community, they believed their music should be treated as an art
form, not mere product. Sixties rockers from Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix to
Janis Joplin and the Doors saw themselves as serious artists, not peddlers of
teeny-bop pop. The notion that rock is art also guided the programming of
the electric ballrooms, which featured veteran bluesmen like B. B. King and
rock ’n’ roll pioneers like Chuck Berry, but rarely showcased contemporary
soul artists. It didn’t matter that black performers like King and Berry saw
themselves as entertainers; among young whites who frequented the ball-
rooms they had the status of, well, roots musicians.28 What promoters and
radio programmers of the ’50s and early ’60s had believed was R&B’s biggest
handicap among white teens—its rawness or “blackness”—became its selling
point in the late ’60s among hip rock audiences, who began to look down
upon most “commercial” black music.
By the early ’70s, rock and R&B audiences were moving even farther
apart. With rock musicians jettisoning the catchy, two-and-a-half-minute
pop song in favor of something more improvisational and ambitious—and
some would say pompous and self-indulgent—rock and R&B shared less
common ground musically. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” couldn’t be
easily reconciled with the music of Al Green or the Stylistics. And radio pro-
grammers and booking agents made no effort to bring these audiences to-
gether. Crowds at the Fillmore had at least been exposed to black musicians,
even if they were performers whose fan base was now mostly white. But
when rock deserted the ballrooms for the more profitable arenas and stadi-
ums, black and white acts rarely even played the same bill, save at Rolling
Stone concerts.
The situation worsened with radio, too. By the mid-’70s, radio con-
sultants fixated on the bottom line were transforming free-form radio
into adult-oriented rock, a format geared to “narrowcasting” rather than
broadcasting. AOR targeted white males between the ages of thirteen and
twenty-five by playing nothing but hard rock: Journey, Reo Speedwagon,
the Who, and lots of Led Zeppelin. AOR, or “classic rock” as it’s now
called, subscribed to such a narrow definition of rock that it made ’60s
AM radio seem positively multicultural. In fact, critic Ken Tucker claimed
that AOR guidelines represented nothing short of “institutionalized
racism and sexism.”29
AOR playlists helped shape peoples’ understanding of what constituted
rock music, and it served up the worst sort of revisionist history. When San
Francisco FM station KSFX ran a special eight-day program in 1981 chron-
icling rock’s history from 1965 to 1980, only three of the almost two hun-
dred segments concerned the work of black performers, or actually just one,
Jimi Hendrix.30 Nor was black radio, which avoided playing anything that
sounded like rock, any better than AOR. Top 40, now on the FM band, con-
tinued playing a mix of soul and rock, but AOR and the new Adult Contem-
porary format, which featured soft rock, had eaten into Top 40’s market
share, and it was no longer the dominant force it had been. Racial segment-
ing of the airwaves had a profound effect on listening tastes—white and
black. In this context Jimi Hendrix’s blues-inspired music became so
linked to white rock that to a gay black waiter at the disco where I worked his
songs were simply “white trash music.” AOR listeners would never know
that black rock was not an oxymoron, that Nona Hendryx and Parliament-
Funkadelic rocked with the best of them.31 The apartheid policy of rock pro-
moters and radio programmers affected black performers, some of whom,
like future disco hitmakers Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers, simply gave
up trying to break into rock and went back to playing R&B.
Rock criticism, like free-form radio and the electric ballrooms, was a
distinctly ’60s invention. Although Rolling Stone used a more inclusive defi-
nition of rock music than AOR radio, the paper’s coverage of female and
black performers left a lot to be desired. The first time Rolling Stone featured
women was a cover story on groupies. Although the paper lavished attention
on Hendrix, whose music was quite recognizably rock, it gave even Sly Stone
and Stevie Wonder short shrift. It did publish long and loving features on
Little Richard and Chuck Berry, but as roots musicians. As one angry letter
writer observed, black musicians were more likely to turn up in the obituar-
ies than anywhere else in Rolling Stone. Typical was the magazine’s treatment
of bluesman Arthur Crudup, who’d written and recorded “It’s Alright,
Mama” the song that would launch Elvis’s career. When Crudup died, Rolling
Stone ran an obituary. The caption under his picture actually read, “He never
expected anything good. That’s all right, Mama“32
Rolling Stone’s privileging of white rock reflected the lily-white compo-
sition of its mostly twenty-something staff. From its founding in 1967
through the 1980s, the paper employed no black writers. The paper’s treat-
ment of black performers also owed a lot to the rock-equals-art mantra,
which held great sway with rock critics, many of whom felt that soul music,
by virtue of its commercialism, fell far short of that standard.33 All too
often, critics treated black musicians like dinosaurs, “precursors who,
having taught the white men all they know, must gradually recede into the
distance.”34 Rolling Stone’s senior editor Ralph Gleason didn’t want black
musicians to lumber off into the distance; he wanted them to emulate the
new hippie bands of Haight-Ashbury. As early as 1967, he chastised “Negro
performers from James Brown to . . . the Four Tops” for being “on an Ed
Sullivan trip, striving as hard as they can to get on that stage and become
part of the American success story, while the white rock performers are
motivated to escape from the stereotype.”35 Gleason advised black musi-
cians to come to the Fillmore where they might learn the new hip style from
groups like the Jefferson Airplane.
Not everyone at Rolling Stone was ready to consign black music to the
dustbin of history. In its early years, the paper’s writers included a number
of R&B aficionados who wrote with great passion about the music. However,
the ease with which many of these same critics passed judgment on which
R&B records were authentically “black” and which weren’t is startling.36
Stax and Atlantic artists like Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Sam and
Dave usually passed muster, but Motown acts often flunked the test. Time
and again, Rolling Stone condemned the Detroit company for producing for-
mulaic, assembly-line black pop for white people.37 Motown’s records were
“Tom travesties,” snickered one writer, and its artists were “locked into
their plastic nightclub performing style.”38
No Motown group came in for more criticism than the Supremes.
Rolling Stone’s highly influential and famously cranky critic Jon Landau
declared that the group was “totally committed to show business values
and lost their soul long ago.”39 By contrast, Stax artist Otis Redding was
the quintessential soul man, whose singing, Landau wrote, was “direct,”
“simple,” and “unintellectual.”40 Otis’s “understanding of music was not
something he could put on or take off, depending on chart trends,” wrote
Landau, approvingly. “He was truly a ‘folk’ artist.”41 Landau’s under-
standing of R&B echoed Norman Mailer’s patronizing view of jazz as the
expression of feeling, “the music of orgasm,” uninformed by intellect.42
What Landau and other critics seemed to value most about soul music was
its apparent resistance to musical trends. It was familiar: raw, intuitive,
expressive, and sexual—perhaps just like the people who made it. But
black musicians, like other black people in the ’60s, weren’t standing
still. And as the decade wore on white rock critics didn’t always like what
they heard.
Don’t forget the Motor City actually, black people weren’t

Dancing in the street standing still in 1959 either, the
Laura Nyro with Labelle, “Dancing in the Street,” year that Berry Gordy founded
1971, produced by Gamble and Huff Motown Records. Indeed, the
(originally recorded by Martha and the Vandellas critical disparagement of Motown
for Motown Records, 1964)
stemmed in large part from
Gordy’s deliberate efforts to make
black music the “Sound of Young
America,” something unthinkable just a few years earlier. Although the
“crossover concept” was part of R&B from the very beginning, independent
R&B record companies in the postwar years nonetheless assumed that their
core audience would be black.43 What set Gordy apart was his conviction that
he could make music that would finally obliterate the color line by appealing
equally to white and black teenagers. Gordy didn’t think that having his tunes
covered by white artists was the most he could hope for. Motown records
would be pop hits in their own right, just as his acts would penetrate the bet-
ter white clubs rather than be restricted to the chitlin circuit. Gordy’s refusal
to be confined to the black market was, as Gerald Early argues, the “really rev-
olutionary thing” about Motown.44
To many rock critics, though, Gordy’s crossover strategy was reac-
tionary: it contributed to the denaturing or bleaching of black music. Typi-
cal is Rolling Stone writer Peter Guralnick’s view of Motown as “so much
more popular, so much more socially acceptable, so much more arranged
and predictable, so much more white.”45 In fact, he excluded Motown from
his landmark book, Sweet Soul Music, on precisely these grounds. Yet to mil-
lions of African Americans, Motown was soul music as surely as Atlantic or
Stax.46 And though white rock critics hailed Atlantic Records as the real
stuff, the company’s founder, Ahmet Ertegun, has described his label’s
sound as “urbanized, watered-down versions of real blues.” Atlantic’s R&B
approximated “authentic blues,” according to Ertegun, but it was “cleaner,
less rough and perforce more sophisticated,” which made it an easier sell to
white teens.47 Ertegun may have been tailoring the sound for white con-
sumption, but until the mid-sixties Atlantic artists remained far more pop-
ular among blacks.
In truth, blacks’ musical tastes have always been elastic enough to en-
compass crossover artists like Nat “King” Cole, the Mills Brothers, or Sam
Cooke. As far back as the early twentieth century, black musicians who
played in juke joints and nightclubs had to mix blues with ragtime and
hokum because black audiences preferred variety.48 But the idea that
African Americans are a monolith, united in taste and behavior, is a potent
one, for whites and blacks alike. “Varieties of speech, rhythm, diction, ac-
cent, taste, and style are fine for white people,” as cultural critic Stanley
Crouch has pointed out, “but there must be a psychological and spiritual tub
of tar a Negro should sit in each morning before facing the day.”49 This idea
proved especially seductive in the late ’60s when black power promoted
precisely this sort of racial essentialism.
Motown wasn’t more white than Stax Records, but it was more pop—a
category of music that it turns out was never truly white. African-American
songwriters played such an important role in early twentieth-century pop-
ular music that Irving Berlin once felt it necessary to point out that not all of
Tin Pan Alley’s composers and lyricists were black. As blues historian Fran-
cis Davis points out, standards like “Pretty Baby,” “I’m Just Wild About
Harry,” and “Some of These Days,” seem “raceless” to us now in part be-
cause their writers “no doubt strove to leave race out of them,” but they were
all written by African Americans.50 Even the blues, which white preserva-
tionists like folklorist Alan Lomax promoted as a kind of folk music immune
to market forces, was a form of pop.51
Popular music—rock, R&B, pop, and even the blues—is so much the
product of musical miscegenation that there’s no such thing as music which
is truly “white” or “black.” That said, this isn’t the perception of most lis-
teners, critics, radio programmers, and record company executives. A
gospel moan or wail, or singing “ax” instead of “ask,” tag a record as black.52
In the early years of Motown when Gordy was trying to conquer white Amer-
ica, there was a limit to how much “blackness” Gordy would allow. Hyper-
conscious about black representation and white reception, Gordy and his
two sisters instituted an artist development program. Female singers were
sent to the Motown charm school where they learned how to walk, sit, fix
their hair, and wear white gloves and long gowns on stage; male performers
were put through their paces, too. Given many whites’ racial prejudice or
just deep ignorance about African Americans, it made sense for Gordy to
prioritize artist makeovers. The Supremes and the Temptations were often
young whites’ first encounter with black culture. Even admiring whites
sometimes harbored attitudes about blacks that were distressingly Mail-

eresque.53 Up against entrenched racial attitudes about blacks as a simple,
spontaneous people lacking restraint and polish, Gordy worked against
stereotype, sometimes to a maddening degree.
Gordy’s sensitivity to white sensibilities could be problematic. As late as
1966, the year “black power” began edging out “we shall overcome,” he came
close to nixing Stevie Wonder’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”
because he feared the song was too controversial.54 He promoted the tiny-
voiced Diana Ross over fellow Supreme Florence Ballard, who had the
“pipes,” because Ross had the “poise” and a pop voice to match.55 And he
sweetened the music. In the early years, he also showcased female singers,
calculating that they would encounter less white resistance than male singers.
Strategically, this may have been the proper course to follow. After all, just two
years before Motown’s founding, black rock ’n’ roller Frankie Lymon had set
off a scandal when he danced with a white girl on Alan Freed’s TV show.
Although one wishes Gordy had been less attuned to white tastes, the
blanket dismissal of Motown as too “white” rested on certain assumptions,
particularly the idea that blacks “remain unaffected,” as Ralph Ellison put it,
“by the social structures, national manners” or the “the complex give and
take of acculturation.”56 Accordingly, most white rock critics assumed soul
artists received their musical education in church, preferred gritty soul to
white pop, and only recorded the standards under duress or because they
were sell-outs. Yet this didn’t describe Motown’s artists, most of whom re-
ceived their musical education in the Detroit public schools.57 Nor did the
Supremes record the standards because they were “foisted” on them by Mo-
town. Rather, says Supreme Mary Wilson, the group’s “roots were in Ameri-
can music—everything from rock to show tunes—and always had been.”58
Wilson’s own influences included the McGuire Sisters, Patti Page and Doris
Day. And she was hardly alone. Marvin Gaye longed to sing like Frank Sina-
tra and Smokey Robinson claimed black jazz-pop singer Sarah Vaughan as a
critical influence. These artists weren’t less black for liking pop music or
“corrupted” because “they didn’t sound like Aretha Franklin or Otis Red-
ding.”59 Rather, their embrace of pop and their desire to cross over reflected
their sense of themselves as fully American. Like many other African Amer-
icans growing up in the ’50s during the Second Reconstruction they weren’t
sitting at the back of the bus. Or as Stevie Wonder put it, “When you say I’m a
black musician . . . that’s putting me in a particular box and saying . . . stay . . .

right . . . where . . . you . . . are!”60 At Motown artists laid their claim to the
American Dream; in the process they changed American music and culture.
Hey Nineteen, that’s ’Retha Franklin by the late ’60s, more and more
She don’t remember the Queen of Soul R&B artists were struggling to
Steely Dan, “Hey Nineteen,” 1980 break past the constraints—musi-
cal and economic—of soul music.
Otis Redding aspired to assume
the mantle of his friend Sam Cooke, the great gospel-turned-pop singer. At
the time of his fatal plane crash, though, Otis had never penetrated the pop
Top 10. Guitarist Steve Cropper, with whom Otis wrote the posthumously
released 1968 hit “(Sitting on) the Dock of the Bay,” admitted that they had
set out to make a pop record. “You can’t just keep doing R and B songs like
‘Mr. Pitiful,”’ he said, “because it’s only going to cater to a certain amount
of people.”61 Aretha Franklin had always struggled to transcend the limits of
rhythm and blues. After all, it was she who demanded that “Over the Rain-
bow” be included in her 1960 session with Columbia Records. But when the
popularity of Southern soul started to wane in 1969, “Lady Soul” tried to
reposition herself as a “mainstream pop/jazz singer” while at the same time
playing up her new Afrocentric style. “Thus in 1971,” wrote one white critic,
“we were confronted with an enigmatic new Aretha, wearing her natural
hair and African clothes, singing tunes like “This Girl’s in Love with You”
and “Call Me” backed by a large orchestra.”62 To some critics, Aretha’s move
to a slick pop-soul was further evidence of what critic Guralnick called her
distressingly “middlebrow” taste.63
Aretha was hardly the only artist trying to break past hardcore, funky
soul music. She did it by covering songs like Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge
over Troubled Water,” and pop-oriented material, but her singing re-
mained fiery, passionate. However, her labelmates at Atlantic Records,
Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, helped advance a laid-back, minimal-
ist, jazzy black pop. So did Bill Withers, whose brooding 1971 hit “Ain’t No
Sunshine,” was produced by ex-Stax player Booker T. Jones. However, no
one was as smooth as Al Green. On songs like the slinky “Here I Am (Come
and Take Me),” Green, in his plaintive, aching falsetto, conveyed romantic
yearning like few other singers. Green was one of many falsetto vocalists
whose records dominated the charts in this period. In fact, so much creamy,
cool soul music featured falsetto singers like Eddie Kendricks of the Temp-
tations and Phillipé Wynne of the Spinners that critic Jon Landau dubbed it
“sissy soul.” And it’s true that these singers sounded tentative, pleading,
and yielding by contrast to the full-throttle masculinity of the sixties’ lead-
ing soul men—James Brown, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Johnnie Taylor
and Eddie Floyd.
Much of the new suave soul was coming out of Philadelphia, where song-
writers Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff began producing artists in 1966.
The duo’s work with Jerry Butler, who’d first made a name for himself in the
’50s with Curtis Mayfield in the Impressions, would become a prototype for
the new cool soul.64 But Gamble and Huff are best known for Billy Paul’s
“Me and Mrs. Jones” and their work with the O’Jays (“I Love Music”),
Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass (“The Love
I Lost”), and their house band, MFSB, whose massive hit “TSOP (The Sound
of Philadelphia)” became the theme song for the TV show Soul Train and an
early disco hit.65 When Gamble and Huff teamed up with producer Thom
Bell and established Philadelphia International Records they set out to
build a Motown-like empire.66 PIR would become the dominant force in
black music through the seventies. During the disco years, while Motown
stumbled, PIR prospered.
PIR was always a purveyor of smooth soul, but this wasn’t true of Stax
Records, the epicenter of down-home Southern soul music. In 1969 Stax
pioneered a whole new kind of soul when it released Isaac Hayes’s offbeat
album Hot Buttered Soul. Hayes had written and produced Sam and Dave’s
biggest hits with his collaborator David Porter. However, Hayes’s own
album sounded nothing like “Soul Man” or “Hold On! I’m a Comin.”’ Nor
did the record’s cover, which featured a strange top-down shot of the
artist, look anything like the cover art of other R&B albums. Hayes didn’t
strike the usual soul-man pose, smiling winningly at the camera. In fact,
his face was barely visible. What stood out instead was Hayes’s shiny bald
head, cool shades, and the imposing gold chains draped around his neck.
“I suppose bald was as black as you could get,” he later said. “We did it as a
joke, but everyone liked it ’cause it was different and it was out front.”67
Hayes set out to be different and break the mold, and Hot Buttered Soul had
a weird, almost experimental feel to it. This wasn’t a calculated crossover

move, and Stax was surprised when the album hit number four on the pop
album charts. With its schlocky, over-the-top arrangements and super-
long cuts (only four on the album), Hot Buttered Soul was cool, languid bed-
room music. His twelve-minute cover of Dionne Warwick’s “Walk on By,”
which Hayes embellished with psychedelic guitar shadings, spaced-out
sound effects, and innumerable false fade-outs, sounded like music wait-
ing for a movie. In 1971, Hayes scored the music for the blaxploitation
movie Shaft, and his theme song for it hit the top of the pop charts and won
an Oscar. Instantly recognizable with its tireless four/four hi-hats and ir-
resistible wah-wah guitar, “The Theme from Shaft” edged soul music clos-
er to disco.
Hayes’s solo efforts sounded like a refusal of Stax’s gritty, raw brand of
soul music and they prefigured the lush music of disco’s big man, Barry
White. The singer who most influenced Hayes was Sam Cooke, the original
cool soul man. “He was sophisticated,” Hayes later explained, and “that’s
what we wanted.”68 Hayes was just one of many soul artists who bridled at
the idea that the color of his skin meant he should sound recognizably
“black.” If be-bop was black jazz musicians’ response to the perennial
problem of white appropriation, or theft, as Thelonious Monk claimed
(“we’re going to create something they can’t steal because they can’t play
it.”69 ), perhaps this silky, polished soul was in some way about denying
white America’s expectation that soul music was about the “hard” life,
music that had all “the authenticity of collard greens boiling on the stove,”
as Time magazine put it.70 Just as many blacks had abandoned the blues be-
cause it was so redolent of trouble and bad times, so many now embraced
music that broke with the idea that soul must sound earthy and primitive.
Maybe the ascendance of soft soul reflected black musicians’ annoyance
with the white rock community’s knee-jerk veneration of veteran black
bluesmen and soul men, the grittier the better. One thing’s for sure, many
white rock critics were mystified or disdainful of this new lite soul, which they
judged “too artificial.”71 “What happened to the days when black music was
black and not this mush of vacuous Muzak and pretentious drivel?” sneered
Britain’s New Musical Express.72 If the new sweet soul was wildly popular with
pop audiences, the white rock audience, tuned into the hard rock of AOR or
the singer-songwriter music of Adult Contemporary radio, was oblivious to it.
By 1980, most teenagers, like the nineteen-year-old in the Steely Dan song,
probably wouldn’t have recognized the music of Aretha Franklin.
People movin’ out, people movin’ in at the same time that soul
Why? Because of the color of their skin music was becoming creamier
Run, run, run, but you sure can’t hide and cooler, it was also begin-
“Ball of Confusion,” The Temptations, 1970 ning to reflect the new black
consciousness.73 This was a
strange moment in R&B be-
cause no one really knew how far the envelope could be pushed before
whites turned off or how far it needed to be pushed to remain “relevant” to
black fans. Ironically, the political imperative was felt at the very moment
when the opportunities for inclusion in the musical mainstream had never
been more plentiful. After all, by 1969 lots of soul artists were playing Vegas
and R&B hits routinely made the pop Top 10. So just as black artists were
reaping the benefits of crossover like never before, they encountered
friends, family, and politicos who expected them to stay “real,” be “black.”74
Even living large became suspect. Joe Billingslea, formerly of the Contours,
captures the “funny crossfire” in which Motown artists found themselves by
the late ’60s. “Here’s a bunch of black kids going flat-out after the Ameri-
can Dream. The nice house, the clothes, the car. Just what everybody else
has always gone for. But with what was going on, the riots, the Vietnam
mess, it was the down side of the dream. And so just when some cat gets
enough to afford the Continental–bang—it’s not cool to drive it, disrespect-
ful to the movement or whatever.”75
The apparently contradictory pressure of making music for all Ameri-
cans or music geared to other blacks, crossing over or being “black,” was
a conundrum for some African-American musicians.76 After all, James
Brown had found himself locked out of the pop Top 10 after he cut “Say It
Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” in 1968.77 However, in this period tec-
tonic shifts seemed to occur in a matter of months and what seemed rad-
ical quickly became merely reasonable. By 1970, a full four years after
black power began eclipsing integration, record companies began to grasp
that there was a lucrative market for music that reflected the new black
consciousness.
Motown tested the water in the summer of 1970 with the Temptations’
“Ball of Confusion,” which topped the black charts and just missed duplicat-
ing that success on the pop charts. “Ball of Confusion” opened with an in-
dictment of white flight, but it quickly devolved into a cover-all-the-mar-
kets number in which the Temps recited a laundry list of issues and events,
everything from rising “unemployment” and “tax deductions” to “the Beat-
les’ new record.” The song tried to be relevant to African Americans, but
without alienating whites, for whom the psychedelic guitar break was pre-
sumably intended. While “Ball” was still in the Top 10, Motown released
Edwin Starr’s “War,” an unequivocally antiwar anthem whose opening line
went, “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” Starr’s song hit num-
ber one on the pop charts, and was only slightly less popular with black lis-
teners. Six months later, Motown put out Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,”
the first in his extraordinary aural triptych that included “Inner City Blues,”
and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” Throughout most of 1971, Gaye’s
music was so popular it was just a spin away on the radio dial, but, then, his
tone was plaintive, even perplexed, never angry. With the Undisputed
Truth’s “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” R&B became edgier, with lines like,
“Beware of the pat on the back/It just might hold you back,” which took aim
at duplicitous white liberals.
Motown’s “Smiling Faces” was one of the big hits of the summer of 1971,
and it represented a watershed moment: black power had finally entered the
Top 10. However, Sly Stone’s long-awaited There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which was
released during 1971’s holiday season, set a new standard for uncompro-
mised honesty. Sly had promised that this LP would be his “most optimistic
of all,” but there wasn’t a glimmer of hopefulness anywhere on it.78 Songs
that on the surface seemed perky and upbeat were disconcertingly bleak
upon further listening.79 The first single, “Family Affair,” which had a bub-
bly, syncopated rhythm track and a catchy refrain, shot up the charts to
number one. But its subject matter was heavy, and its source apparently per-
sonal: families and the damage they cause. One child “grows up to be some-
body that just loves to learn,” Sly sings, the other child grows up to be
“somebody you just love to burn.” Newlyweds try to stay faithful, but love
may not be enough. “You can’t leave cause your heart’s there, but you can’t
stay cause you’ve been somewhere else.” Throughout, Sly moaned, shrieked,
mumbled, growled, and slurred his words as though he were on the verge of
nodding out, which he may have been. By this point, Sly was routinely miss-
ing gigs and his mischievousness had acquired a nasty edge—the result,
many figured, of drugs.80 Sly had his personal demons, but he sounds so
weary on this album that one wonders if the effort to make music that ap-
pealed equally to whites and blacks hadn’t become too great a burden.
Riot drew raves from those rock critics who were still engaged with
R&B.81 But they agreed the album was “no fun.” With Riot, Greil Marcus
wrote, Sly’s “old politics had turned into death, his exuberance into dope,
and his old music into a soundtrack for a world that didn’t exist.” Despite
the album’s darkness, it quickly jumped to the top spot on both the R&B
and pop charts, most likely because of its great dance grooves.82 Critic Dave
Marsh maintained that Sly’s white fans were put off by the album. “The
white counterculture,” he wrote, “responded with all the racism that a
decade of consciousness-raising hadn’t stamped out. White kids may have
danced to Sly’s new music, but they weren’t happy with it.”83 Riot was un-
mistakably antiestablishment, but it didn’t speak to whites. There were no
cheery songs extolling the brotherhood of man. Sly even made fun of his
popular hit “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” with the excruciat-
ingly stretched-out, slowed-down, bass-heavy “Thank You for Talkin’ to
Me Africa.” Finally he gave the song a sound to match the haunting lyrics of
the original.
Sly could still summon pop hooks easily enough, but with Riot he went
deeper into the funk. With its portentous bass and sometimes enervated
beats, Riot seemed to be suggesting that soul music in its most “chipper,
choreographed, commercial form” was passé.84 Likewise, Sly’s voice, more
cartoonish than ever, seemed a refusal of the romantic soul man tradition.85
Yet, Riot’s use of the synthesizer and the drum machine—one of its earliest
uses ever—anticipated disco, the perkiest music of all. Certainly “Family Af-
fair” was a rhythmic influence on two early disco hits, George McRae’s
“Rock Your Baby” and the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat.” Sly’s music
had a raw, almost haphazard quality at odds with the lockstep predictability
of disco, but, as others have noted, rhythmically his music nonetheless pre-
figured disco.86 Some producers and musicians took Riot’s dance grooves to
help create disco, others—Stevie Wonder, the Isley Brothers, War, Rufus,
and George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic crew—carried on Sly’s work of

smashing the boundaries between soul, rock, and pop music.
Riot’s influence on R&B wasn’t simply musical, though. In the year and a
half after its release, it was as though the floodgates of black disillusionment
and despair had opened up. The summer of 1972 saw the release of Curtis
Mayfield’s soundtrack for the blaxploitation film, Superfly. Both the mordant
“Freddie’s Dead” and “Superfly” deliberately undercut the movie’s celebra-
tion of the living-large gangsta and were radio staples well into 1973. Before
the year was out Mayfield’s songs were joined by a remarkable group of sin-
gles: the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers,” Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man,” War’s “Slip-
pin’ into Darkness,” Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” and the Temptation’s
protodisco “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” with its haunting last line, “and when
he died, all he left us was alone.” Several months later, Wonder released his
epic “Living for the City.” This was music of “worry,” ruthlessly honest music
that looked fearlessly at the problems within black communities.87 In con-
trast to earlier message music like Curtis Mayfield’s “We’re a Winner” or
James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” these songs aren’t feel-good an-
thems of racial pride. More often than not the trouble in these songs lies in-
side the community, as in “Slippin’ into Darkness,” where “the brothers
never say their names.” In the end, this music feels inseparable from African
Americans’ growing apprehension that the black movement had lost its mo-
mentum (not to mention its leaders) and white America its will to change.88
Curiously, although this music dealt with racism, it dominated the pop
charts. It was “an uneasy and exciting conjunction,” thought critic Dave
Marsh, who wondered if white audiences would continue to support “ma-
ture” black pop.89 However, white listeners’ tolerance for troubled music
about black America wasn’t tested again in the ’70s. Sly took off two years
before cutting Fresh, the highlight of which was his improbable cover of
Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera,”90 He continued to have moderate success
through 1975, after which point his career took a nose dive, but he never cut
an album like Riot again. And Marvin Gaye followed “Trouble Man” with the
slinky, make-out hit “Let’ s Get It On.” R&B shifted gears as the brooding,
foreboding music of the early ’70s gave way to cheery party music without
any apparent political meaning. As R&B made the disco turn, sympathetic
white critics were dismayed by the way that everything—melody, lyrics,
singer, and players—was now subsumed by the beat.91
Reflecting on the turn away from socially engaged R&B, Greil Marcus
noted that most of it had been made by producers whose commitment was
to hit-making. Instead of making music that made history, they simply
“drifted into accommodation.”92 Marcus saw parallels between the change
in R&B and the about-face of the Black Panther Party, which in 1972 became
involved in electoral politics and began working with black churches.93 The
retreat into disco and more glossy black pop reflected, he thought, what
happens when “something like the truth is out.”94 While the truth, compli-
cated and messy as it was, undoubtedly was a casualty of the disco turn, it’s
not clear that accommodation was driving this shift. Maybe disco was about
dissembling or camouflage, or maybe it represented an effort to move be-
yond the despair of the early seventies. Nile Rodgers has said that the music
he made with the popular disco group Chic was his effort to provide a sense
of hopefulness. To Rodgers, who had been involved in the Black Panther
Party, there was a political utility and a political message in upbeat songs
like the dance floor favorite, “We Are Family.”95
If there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it before there was disco, there
If there’s a remedy, I’ll run from it. were discotheques. The national
Diana Ross, “Love Hangover,” 1976 dance craze spawned by Chubby
Checker’s 1960 hit “The Twist”
made New York discotheques like
the Peppermint Lounge famous during the early ’60s. But with the arrival of
psychedelia in the mid-’60s discotheques began to seem hopelessly square. A
new kind of free-form, anything-goes dancing took root in hip rock ball-
rooms like the Avalon and the Fillmore in San Francisco. Some speculate that
the early ’70s shift from acid to downers put an end to the dancing, but hippie
ballrooms also began closing in the wake of Woodstock. After 1969’s huge
outdoor festival, the move to more profitable arenas was on. Rock music, or a
lot of it, also became more arty and pretentious, and less danceable.
However, the rise of stadium rock had no effect on the nightlife habits
of blacks, gays, and Latinos, who had never been much interested in the
hippie ballrooms, which were, after all, overwhelmingly white and het-
erosexual. At private parties and clubs and in neighborhood bars they
made Motown and post-Motown soul their soundtrack. People called it
“party music,” and Rolling Stone’s R&B critic Vince Aletti wrote about it as
early as the fall of 1972. Early disco culture was an underground scene, one
that record companies couldn’t have cared less about and made no effort
to exploit. Deejays developed their own independent network for public-
ity and record distribution (in the form of record pools) without help
from large record companies. It was an engineer, Tom Moulton, who came
up with the idea of providing club deejays with long-playing, twelve-inch
singles that were specially mixed with extended instrumental breaks for
smoother segues.
Most of the leading creators of early disco, from Gamble and Huff to Mo-
town’s Norman Whitfield and Van (“The Hustle”) McCoy had worked for years
as songwriters and producers of soul music. At first, disco was practically in-
distinguishable from R&B.96 One of the first disco hits, 1974’s “Love’s
Theme,” by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra could have been mistak-
en for an Isaac Hayes song. That summer’s big dance music hits, “Rock Your
Baby” and “Rock the Boat,” sounded like lots of other slick, sweet early ’70s
soul. In fact, early disco, from George McRae’s “Rock Your Baby” to the Jack-
son 5’s “Dancing Machine” to “Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied)” by the B.T. Ex-
press was much slower than later disco and lacked disco’s signature 4/4
thump. Over time, of course, disco did become “disco,” which is to say it
evolved into something much more formulaic. Even so, disco was not mono-
lithic. There was melodic R&B-flavored disco, funk that defied the 4/4 beat,
and the hyperstylized, synthesized Eurodisco of Swiss-Italian producer Gior-
gio Moroder. In many discos, especially those that catered to African Ameri-
cans, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor were routinely mixed with funk,
from Cameo to Parliament-Funkadelic. But if there were deep connections
between R&B and disco, the new dance music did severely limit the opportu-
nities for a vocalist to stretch out and improvise. Some singers, particularly
those in Chic, sang in a clipped, almost flat fashion. Singers were prisoners of
the beat or they were dispensed with altogether in instrumental tracks. When
a song had words, the lyrics were often inconsequential and self-referential,
as in “shake your booty,” “put your body in it,” or “get down tonight.”
Disco came to be associated with the glitterati of Studio 54, but its ori-
gins were working-class, as anyone who listened to the lyrics could tell. One
piece of evidence, as journalist Andrew Kopkind pointed out, was the regu-
larity with which “weekend” turned up in disco tunes. “Working-class kids

toil all week and wait for their one big shot at fun, escape, and dreams on the
weekend,” wrote Kopkind. “Quite the other way with rock culture,” he
notes. “Hippies hang out all week and can’t tell Saturday night from Tuesday
afternoon.”97 Disco’s fantasy of the good life, of upward mobility, betrayed
its working-class roots just as rock’s bohemian fantasy of downward mobil-
ity betrayed its middle-class roots.
If going to the disco was a way that working-class blacks and Latinos could
reclaim the body as an “instrument of pleasure rather than an instrument of
labor,” then for gays it was a way to assert an identity often hidden during the
day. “The nighttime [became] the right time.”98 Or, to be more accurate, in
the wake of 1969’s Stonewall riot (where gays fought the police and many be-
lieve gay liberation was born), the nighttime finally became the right time for
gays, too. Until Stonewall many gay bars hadn’t even permitted same-sex
dancing. At one popular gay male bar on Fire Island employees monitored the
dance floor by shining a flashlight into the eyes of anyone engaging in “illegal
behavior,” defined as two men even facing each other as they danced.
With gay liberation gay men in big cities were suddenly visible. “I was
shocked by how much the city had changed,” recalls writer Edmund White
of his return to New York in 1970. “Where before there had been a few gay
boys hanging out on a stoop along Christopher Street, now there were
armies of men marching in every direction off Sheridan Square.” White had
been gone only six months, but in his absence a cultural revolution had
swept Manhattan. Homosexuals, even once-shy white gays, radiated a new-
found boldness and daring. Decked out in snug micro shorts and T-shirts,
they moved through Sheridan Square “shouting and waving and surging
into the traffic” as if the streets were theirs. “Is this a holiday or what?” was
White’s amazed, amused reaction. Key to the revolution were the new gay
discos, which White writes had all of a sudden “sprung up like magic mush-
rooms.” “Out of the closets and into the streets” may have been the rallying
cry of the newly emergent gay liberation movement, but in the ’70s discos
and bathhouses, not politics, were arguably the adhesive in the gay male
community. Not since the pansy craze of the Roaring Twenties when the ho-
mosexual subculture was so vibrant that gays spoke of “coming out” into gay
society, had gay male culture been so public.
Some say that the first commercial disco was Fire Island’s Ice Palace,
which opened in the summer of 1970, just one year after the Stonewall
riot.99 But others maintain that the ur-disco was the Loft, a private gay club
in Manhattan, which opened Valentine’s Day, 1970, in the home of David
Mancuso. What is certain is that within months Manhattan boasted many
gay discos including the Tenth Floor, 12 West, Aux Puces, and the Sanctuary.
It’s no accident that the first discos began cropping up so soon after
Stonewall. After years of being hassled by management and arrested during
police raids, gays refused to act straight and refused to stop dancing.
Dancers, accustomed to juke boxes that left them stranded awkwardly on the
dance floor waiting for the next song—a most unwelcome return to reality—
could now dance all night long without interruption. Deejays made that pos-
sible by mixing records together so that the music never stopped, and in es-
pecially expert hands, even sounded seamless. That was the point. No more
being interrupted by raids or hostile bartenders, or by straights looking for
a freak show, or by something as simple as a song ending. In gay discos “the
throbbing lights, the engulfing sound, the heightened energy, and the hy-
perbolic heat” created the impression, wrote one journalist, “that the world
is enclosed in this hall, that there is only now, in this place and time.”100 Gay
discos were liberated space in the ’70s, a time, writes Village Voice columnist
Richard Goldstein, of a “psychic Intifada: a sloughing off of centuries of
shame and a venting of pent-up desire.”101 In those days, it wasn’t unusual
for gay clubbers to stay out dancing until noon the next day. If there was a
“cure” for disco fever or for homosexuality, gays were having none of it.
They were staying in the now, chanting along with Diana Ross, “Don’t call
the doctor, don’t call my momma, don’t call the preacher, I don’t need it.”
Most observers believed that the new dance music was at odds with the
ethos of the sixties. Critics thought disco a perfect expression of the shallow,
coked-up, narcissistic seventies—the much maligned Me Decade. Journal-
ist Andrew Kopkind had a more complicated reaction to disco. He conced-
ed that many found disco narcissistic, but he pointed out that others be-
lieved a disco dance floor offered greater possibility for connectedness than
a rock concert. He cited the example of a heterosexual female friend, a rock-
er-turned-disco-lover, who felt that “there did get to be a point of no re-
turn” in rock culture. “The ’60s was so solitary, so solipsistic, so narcissis-
tic,” she mused, “look at the way people danced.” By contrast, on a disco
dance floor “you get high with someone else.”102 To Kopkind, a sixties vet-
eran who became an ambivalent convert to the new music, the ’60s were
“braless, lumpy, heavy, rough and romantic,” whereas disco seemed “styl-
ish, sleek, smooth, contrived, and controlled.” But beneath its sleek styl-
ishness, Kopkind saw in disco a welcome challenge to the white, male, mid-
dle-class, heterosexual character of rock culture.
Disco spoke to those not included in sixties rock culture: minorities,
gays, women. Although there was a lot of “high-marketplace maneuvering
that brought disco onto the pop scene,” as literary critic Houston Baker put
it, disco began as music “from below,” offering cheap, all-night entertain-
ment.103 Disco’s roots were in racially and ethnically mixed gay clubs and
bars, not Studio 54 or corporate backrooms.104 Manhattan’s first disco, the
Loft, was both “inter-racial,” and “pan-sexual.” According to Andrew
Holleran, much of whose novel, Dancer from the Dance, takes place at 12
West, a “strange democracy” prevailed at New York’s gay discos, where the
“only ticket of admission was physical beauty—and not even that some-
times.”105 Vince Aletti, the first rock journalist to cover disco, maintains the
new music was “driven by an underground idea of unity.”106 Cultural critic
Walter Hughes goes considerably further, arguing that disco celebrated the
bad black girl, and encouraged gay men to “identify with rather than lust
after (much less despise) the ‘bad girl.”’ According to Hughes, disco’s black
divas offered the white gay male a dare he found “particularly provoking”:
the possibility of trying on the “supposedly degraded subject position” of
the black woman.107
There were transcendent moments when the music dissolved all sorts of
social hierarchies and the spirit of the “beloved community” seemed to en-
velop the dance floor. On a crowded, sweaty dance floor certain songs—
“Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” “I’m Coming Out,” “There But For the Grace of
God” and “We Are Family”—created a feeling of solidarity that felt political.
But the revisionist view that discos were edenic sites of egalitarianism
where white gay men were “tempted to occupy the position of the racial and
sexual other” is no truer than than the caricatured view of discos as exclu-
sionary haunts of the rich.108 Some discos, such as the Loft or the legendary
Paradise Garage, where black deejay Larry Levan presided over the floor,
were inclusive—at least of gay men. But at many gay discos unity didn’t ex-
tend to people of color, or to women, even (perhaps especially) lesbians.
The feminist and gay press in the ’70s carried numerous stories about gays
of color and women coming up against discriminatory door policies. Gay
deejays who weren’t white or male found that jobs at the better-paying gay
discos eluded them. And owners and managers sometimes tried to manip-
ulate the music. The managers at the gay disco where I worked in the late
’70s asked me on several occasions to “switch” the music from the “black-
er” funk that I favored to “whiter” sounding disco. But if discos were not al-
ways models of racial and gender equality, there was considerable mixing in
them, far more than at ’70s rock concerts.
To rock critics and fans, however, disco was not about unity or commu-
nity. Disco was mindless, monochromatic, repetitive, mechanistic, and
soulless.109 “Muzak that made you want to move,” judged one critic.110 Soul
music was already on a collision course with rock; but disco elaborated all
that the critics disliked about current R&B. For starters, disco reduced the
role of rock’s signature instrument, the guitar, to a percussive instrument.
The subordination of the guitar to the Almighty Beat seemed to arouse real
anxiety in hardcore rockers. In disco the assaultive, phallic work of the lead
guitar was taken over by the whomping beat. At rock concerts the music re-
verberated noisily in one’s eardrums, but discos cranked the bass up so high
that the beat penetrated, literally rocked, one’s entire body.111 A disco with
a good sound system “was akin to an audio orgasmatron,” recalls dance
music aficionado Frank Owens, “that worked on erogenous zones you never
knew you had.”112 Guys at discos not only had zero opportunity to play air
guitar, they found themselves assaulted, violated by the beat. In the process,
“conventional constructions of masculine selfhood” were upended.113 Sat-
urday Night Fever tried to masculinize disco dancing by casting hunky John
Travolta as a woman-chasing dance floor wiz, but the strategy didn’t entire-
ly succeed.114
For straight, white, male rock ’n’ roll’ers accustomed to barely moving
on a dance floor, disco, which required some attention to form and style,
could be truly daunting. But, then, boys and men have often been portrayed
as dance-floor shy. In fact, one of the first big disco hits, 1975’s “Shame,
Shame, Shame” by Shirley and Company, whose chorus went “Shame on
you/if you can’t dance too,” mocked men’s uneasiness on the dance floor.
Discos didn’t just indulge women’s apparently greater passion for dancing,
however. Discos played music, much of it sung by women, about love, or to
be more precise, about love-making. In fact, in Rolling Stone’s history of

rock music, critic Ken Tucker ventures that discophobia arose in part be-
cause “the implicit sexuality of the disco experience—the building, peaking
and climaxing of the music,” made teenaged rock ’n’ roll’ers, who were
more often than not sexually inexperienced, nervous. They preferred rock,
which “dealt with sex as anticipation and neurotic fantasy.” In his view,
disco had greater appeal to a slightly older, more sexually experienced audi-
ence.115 Yet plenty of thirty-something rockers hated disco, and not for lack
of sexual experience.
The resistance to disco probably had more to do with the way in which
the music foregrounded female desire. “Lady Marmalade,” with its soaring
“more, more, more” climax, Gloria Gaynor’s “Honey Bee,” which included
the line, “I’m your honey bee, come on and sting me,” and Evelyn Cham-
pagne King’s memorable “Shame,” were songs about women’s lust. And
then there was Donna Summer’s one-of-a-kind hit “Love To Love You
Baby.” Summer’s song, which featured much orgasmic moaning, was over
17 minutes long, as if to say, this isn’t going to be any two-and-a-half-
minute number. Of course, the radical women’s movement had made the
revolutionizing of heterosexuality among its central goals. In her affection-
ate send-up of the early women’s liberation movement, novelist Alix Kates
Shulman has one of her characters demand “three hours minimum” for sex.
Women were changing the terms of sex, and disco, far more than rock, re-
flected this cultural shift. In a 1993 interview Barry White argued that the
disco “ ’70s was approached as if it was a woman being romanced and made
love to.”116 White notwithstanding, disco tapped into heterosexual men’s
anxiety about women’s sexuality, and what Walter Hughes calls the “suppos-
edly unmappable progressions, limitless multiplicity, and mysterious trig-
gers” of the female orgasm.
Of course, disco’s loudest detractors didn’t attack disco on the grounds
that it promoted women’s sexual assertiveness. To them, disco’s faceless-
ness, formulaic sound, and unabashed commercialism flew in the face of
rock’s ten-year-old struggle to recast itself as serious music with artistic
merit. Rock had succeeded in elevating the performer to an auteur and in
enshrining the album as an art form. Disco came along and shifted the
spotlight away from the performers to the producers, DJ’s, and dancers.
It also “rediscovered the single and then inflated it back up to 12-inch
proportions.”117 To many in the rock community disco felt like the return
of bubblegum, a perception helped by the fact the disco’s ascendance was
aided and abetted by the king of ’60s bubblegum, Neil Bogart, founder of
the leading disco label Casablanca Records. Nor did it help disco’s stand-
ing among rock critics that in the States disco, not punk, had managed to
attract working-class kids.118
Disco had its detractors within the world of R&B, too. James Brown cut a
disco single, “Too Funky in Here,” but said he hated the music. Although
Curtis Mayfield’s music helped pave the way for disco, he claimed disco left
him “flat wondering what the hell to do and even how to do it” because it was
so “monotonous.”119 George Clinton decried disco for plunging dance
music into “the blahs.” African-American music critic Nelson George went
farther, arguing that disco killed R&B.120 George blamed everyone from
celebrity deejay Frankie Crocker of New York superstation WBLS to “beige”
crossover artists like George Benson and club deejays, the true “movers and
shakers” of disco, who whitened the music because they were often gay and
their taste “pseudosophisticated.”121 He also targeted insidious relation-
ships between putatively independent, black-owned companies like Gam-
ble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records and major companies
like CBS, which he claimed dumped R&B in favor of crossover music. In the
end, George saved his fury for upwardly mobile, assimilationist blacks.
Having gained a foothold in a more integrated America, bourgeois blacks
struggled to live as though they were colorless. Consuming crossover be-
came part of the great beige way.122
George blamed crossover for the death of R&B, yet he also vilified disco
for ruining the crossover possibilities of black artists. It turns out that, in
George’s view, there was good and bad crossover. When artists like Sly and
the Family Stone and Isaac Hayes ruled the airwaves “crossover really
worked” because “blackness still fascinated whites and inspired Afro-
Americans. . . .” But soon, he argued, the airwaves were flooded with bad
crossover by disco artists like Barry White and Donna Summer. George is
right that after the disco bubble burst all black music was tarred with its
brush.123 Nowhere were the effects of discophobia more apparent than at
MTV, which began broadcasting in 1981. In its first eighteen months, the
station broadcast 750 videos, of which fewer than two dozen featured black
artists, even including racially mixed bands like the English Beat.124 It took
Michael Jackson’s 1982 runaway hit “Thriller” to break the color barrier at
MTV.125 Incredible as it seems today, the network agreed to play videos from
Jackson’s album only after Columbia Records threatened to pull all of its
artists’ videos from the station if it continued snubbing Jackson.126
George faulted disco for both bleaching and feminizing R&B. Disco’s
stars were women, and the exceptions—Barry White, Sylvester, and the Vil-
lage People—were hardly soul men in the tradition of James Brown. After
all, the corpulent White sang of “playing your game”—the ladies’ game.
Queeny Sylvester, with his piercing falsetto, was openly gay, and the Village
People, whose act was a send-up of the new gay hypermasculinity, were un-
derstood to be gay by many people, if not the Navy officials who permitted
the group to film its “In the Navy” video on one of their ships. R&B’s mas-
culinity deficit didn’t immediately improve with disco’s demise, according
to George. Michael Jackson and Prince may have made wonderful music in
the ’80s, but they also “ran fast and far from blackness and conventional
images of male sexuality.”127 To George’s relief, with the emergence of rap
“solidly masculine black male acts” took center stage.128 George is not alone
in thinking that real soul men aren’t sissies. Black literary scholar Houston
Baker has justified the homophobia and misogyny in rap on the grounds
that disco had displaced “funky black music” and any number of black, male
R&B acts.129 That hip-hop culture involved a “reassertion of manhood
rights . . . was a natural thing.”130 In this schema, where authentic “black-
ness” is macho, women are reduced to bit players and black gays are cast out
as “souls on ice,” unassimilable to “blackness.” This particular criticism of
disco’s gender dynamics echoed writer Ishmael Reed’s attacks on Toni
Morrison and Alice Walker. The success of black women writers, like disco’s
elevation of the diva, implied a symbolic castration of the black arts through
the displacement of “real” black men.
Since the days of blackface minstrelsy, black masculinity has driven
whites’ fascination with “blackness.” And by the mid-’70s “blackness” had
pretty much ceased fascinating white America. Disco hastened its demise.
The classy disco style and the tamed masculinity that seemed to accompany
it was guaranteed to deflect the admiring gaze of rebellious white kids and
bohemians. African-American performers, whether they were wearing
white tuxedos or red, bell-bottomed jumpsuits held no cachet. Nor did
identifying with and being knowledgeable about contemporary popular
black culture any longer confer a badge of hipness upon whites. Rockers
looking for marginality could and sometimes did turn to other kinds of
music—reggae, punk, new wave. What put disco beyond the pale for many
rockers and some blacks—its promotion of upward mobility and a softer
masculinity, the prominence of women, and the lack of racial otherness—
reassured white Middle Americans. The fact that there were only a few disco
personalities—and pretty shallow ones at that—may reveal that love of the
music didn’t extend to its performers. People didn’t buy disco records be-
cause they were intrigued by its performers; the music’s popularity was al-
most in spite of its mostly black creators.131
Now I know what to do rap first penetrated the airwaves

No more sellin’ me to you in 1979 and it brought macho back
Sly Stone, “I Don’t Know (Satisfaction),” 1973 to black music. In contrast to disco,
rap, at least what made it to the air-
waves, was pretty much guys-only
132
territory at first. From the very start, the celebration of masculinity was a
key part of rap. Hip-hop culture “was built to worship urban black male-
ness: the way we speak, walk, dance, dress, think,” according to rap writer
Touré.133 In other ways, too, rap developed a very different sensibility from
disco. For rappers and their fans, “realness” has been everything, whereas
disco’s allure was that it offered an escape from the real. And in contrast to
disco, which diminished the artist, hip-hop made the rapper a larger-than-
life personality. But rap also grew up alongside disco and had a more am-
bivalent relationship to it than many writers imagine. After all, disco pro-
vided the backing tracks for most early rap. The record that first put
hip-hop on the map was the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight,”
which adapted the rhythm track from Chic’s disco hit “Good Times.” Al-
though rappers looked more “street” than disco artists, most white rockers
and critics considered rap indistinguishable from disco—vapid party
music—yet another instance of black music gone astray.
Most rock critics didn’t begin taking rap seriously until 1982 when
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five cut “The Message,” a chilling song
of black anger and despair. “The Message” proved that hip-hop could be
about something besides partying or boasting about one’s rhymes or sex-
ual prowess, and it transformed rap music. It opened up a space for others
like Public Enemy to use the music to explore the state of black America, in
much the way that Sly’s Riot had done a decade earlier.134 “The Message”
was a huge hit within black communities, but it had a negligible effect on
white listening patterns. That didn’t begin to change until Run-D.M.C.,
three middle-class kids from Hollis, Queens, who decked themselves out
in hats, gold chains, and untied Adidas sneakers, hit the scene. Later they
donned leather jackets, which as one former executive at their rap record
company says, made them “cool for black people,” and “rock & roll for
white people.”135 In fact, the group and its record company, which was
owned by Run’s older brother, Russell Simmons, and his white partner
Rick Rubin, always seemed to have had their eye on crossing over to the
rock crowd.136
Run-D.M.C. were middle-class kids with insider connections, but they
looked “street,” and they rapped about the “hard times” of ghetto life.137
They also developed a distinctive sound—a tense, sparse rap with big fat beats
that rocked as hard as anything on MTV. Even so, the racial divide in popular
music was so entrenched that the group failed to make the pop charts despite
hitting the R&B Top 25 seven times in two years. They finally hit number four
on the pop charts in 1986 when they collaborated with the rock band Aero-
smith and recut the latter’s 1976 hit “Walk This Way.” Later that year, Rolling
Stone put Run-D.M.C. on its cover, the first time the magazine had ever done
a cover story on rap. The next breakthrough came a year later when for the
first time a hip-hop album hit the top spot on the pop chart. Given America’s
racial politics, it’s not surprising that the album, Licensed to Ill, was by a white
group, the Beastie Boys.138 In contrast to Vanilla Ice, a flash-in-the-pan
white rapper who strained to be “street,” the Beastie Boys were all-irony-all-
the-time, though few noticed at first. Despite their differences, the Beastie
Boys and Vanilla Ice provided the initial crossover push for rap. In 1988,
MTV, which had been at best lukewarm to rap, launched Yo! MTV Raps. “The
inner cities weren’t even wired for cable when the show took off,” notes so-
ciologist Fred McDonald. “It was the white kids,” he says, “who showed the
music executives that they would buy that sound.”139
White rappers helped put hip-hop over in suburbia, but by the early
’90s, black rappers had captured the imagination of young whites who were
too young to remember the disco wars or that time when black music was too
unhip to admit to liking. It was the gangsta rap of Schooly D, Ice T, NWA, and
Snoop Doggy Dogg that really captivated white teenage boys, the critical de-
mographic group that the rock industry had always taken for granted.140 In
fact, the more hard-edged and “street” rap became, the more appealing it
became to wannabe white kids. For almost a decade now, a period that cor-
responds to gangsta’s ascendancy, rap has outsold rock among white teens.
And eight years after its debut, Yo! MTV Raps had become the channel’s most
popular show.141 A full seventy percent of all rap is sold to whites, mostly
young people.142 Today, rap “is like a birthright, something white kids grow
up listening to.”143
It’s no secret that rap, particularly of the gangsta variety, has been espe-
cially popular with white boys. It’s probably no accident that gangsta rap’s
popularity in the suburbs was coterminous with the rise of alternative rock.
As one critic observed, ’90s rock was filled with “testosterone-challenged”
guys—cross-dressers, self-proclaimed “losers,”and sensitive mope rock-
ers. “Boys,” he wrote, “apart from gangsta rappers, bless them—whine
about their confusion, especially over (sigh) success.”144 For alienated
white boys who feel angry—about school cliques, the college-entrance rat
race, the breakdown of traditional masculinity, the ever-growing assertive-
ness of women, gays, and maybe even minorities—gangsta rap more than
meets the rage quotient. While disco offered sexual and racial minorities an
escape from racism and homophobia, gangsta rap, with its hyper-real sto-
ries of drug dealing, drive-bys, bitches and hoes, has seduced white kids
eager for an alternative to their vanilla suburbs and entranced by the outsize
masculinity of their idols.
In the last ten years we’ve seen the return of Norman Mailer’s White
Negro in the form of “wiggers,” white boys so infatuated with the hardcore
fantasy of blackness that they adopt the jargon and the sartorial tastes of
their hip-hop heroes.145 Some observers believe that this new multicultur-
al hip-hop generation can help lead us out of the morass of racism. “These
white kids aren’t the same white kids,” says one veteran member of the hip-
hop nation.146 Wigger-turned-performance artist Danny Hoch points out
that the cross-racial popularity of rap has given kids across the color line a
common set of cultural referents. In fact, today’s cross-racial culture rep-
resents a remarkable turnaround from the cultural apartheid of much of the
’80s. One wigger who has written about his relationship to rap, Billy Wim-
satt (aka Upski), believes that hip-hop allowed him to repudiate his white
privilege. Wimsatt says he jumped out of his container “like spilled milk”
and began hanging out with blacks as well as whites.147 However, for the
most part the hegemony of hip-hop culture has not led to greater contact
between whites and blacks. In time it may, but residential segregation is a
formidable barrier. Moreover, white boys’ fascination and identification
with “blackness” seems to be built upon distance. Even Danny Hoch admits
that most wiggers don’t really want to contend with what it means to be black
in America.148
To some African Americans, the problem isn’t the shallowness of white
identification, but the substance of that identification. Is gangsta rap popu-
lar with white kids because it peddles the same old nefarious stereotypes?
Hip-hop writer Kevin Powell worries that “white people are sitting back and
saying let’s watch the niggas wave guns in videos and talk [shit] and grab their
crotches and amuse us. It’s almost as if we have become the minstrels of the
1990s.”149 Henry Louis Gates has also condemned the way some rap has
“fallen back on fantasies of the street.” Gates blames this on middle class
blacks who feel guilty about their financial success and their “inability to put
forth a culture of their own.”150 It’s a provocative argument, since most white
people wrongly assume that rap is solely the creation of underclass blacks.151
Black intellectuals have been debating this issue of black self-represen-
tation for years, especially since the days of the Harlem Renaissance when
Young Turk writers like Zora Neale Hurston turned their backs on the idea
that they were obligated to provide positive images of African Americans
and instead wrote fearlessly and honestly about black life. Some thought
these writers were reinforcing racial stereotypes. Richard Wright even
claimed that Hurston’s now classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was in
the “minstrel” tradition.152 Poet Langston Hughes, one of the leading lights
of the Harlem Renaissance, was no stranger to these debates. Speaking at
the First World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966, Hughes argued that black
writers who were indifferent to “whether they straddle the fence of color or
not, are usually the best writers, attempting at least to let their art leap the
barriers of color, poverty, or whatever other roadblocks to artistic truth
there may be.” But he emphasized the unique position of black artists, who
face the dilemma of “which set of readers to please—the white or the black,
or both at once?”153
Negotiating race is always treacherous for black performers, as the man

who wrote “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” understood. For a
time, Sly managed to appeal to both blacks and whites, but he clearly came
to feel that he was walking a tightrope. And then there’s the example of Jimi
Hendrix. Today Hendrix lives on as a race-bending guitar god, but when he
played Monterey Pop in 1967 some critics attributed his success with young
whites to his willingness to “tailor a caricature” for his white audience by
humping his amplifier, “jacking his guitar around his midsection,” and
“grunting and groaning on the brink of sham orgasm.”154 Hendrix dropped
the act, but the conundrum of self-presentation continued to haunt him. By
1969 Hendrix was walking his own tightrope as his white handlers urged
him to drop his black sidemen and get “the cute English guys back,” and
black acquaintances criticized him for “selling out to whitey.”155 This prob-
lem of representation and reception hasn’t gone away. If disco made race
seem a little too incidental, then rap often reified race. Male rappers man-
aged to make themselves the object of fascination once again, but often by
confirming white America’s image of them as “a kind of walking phallic
symbol,” to borrow James Baldwin’s phrase.156
But as we enter the new millennium, there are signs that we are moving
beyond the impoverished possibilities that have so long constrained black
artists. Gangsta rap no longer rules the airwaves and rap has become, in the
words of Roxanne Shanté, truly “co-ed.”157 Although there’s plenty of mi-
sogyny and gay-bashing in today’s rap, some artists are cutting sassy femi-
nist tracks and tackling homophobia.158 Within the hip-hop community
some have challenged the notion of authentic blackness. Cultural critic Tri-
cia Rose has criticized the idea that there is such a thing as “authentic rap”
on the grounds that it not only misapprehends rap but also “silences women
rappers and consumers.”159 Even Chuck D., whose group Public Enemy is
known for its black nationalist raps, has cautioned against judging rappers
on the basis of their apparent “blackness.” “You can’t stop where [hip-hop]
goes,” he’s chided those trying to patrol rap’s racial borders.160 Indeed,
Public Enemy, which has a substantial white following, wants to fashion it-
self a cult band: a black version of the Grateful Dead no less. Maybe in the
years ahead black artists finally will be able to speak to both black and white
audiences without making compromises or betraying themselves.161 Bring
the Noise!
12
White Faces, Black Masks
T
ed danson notwithstanding,
it’s been about sixty years since
white men blackened their faces,
donned oversized, ragged “Negro” costumes, and sang, danced, and bur-
lesqued as blackface minstrels. But blackface minstrelsy, the most popular
form of entertainment in nineteenth-century America, is more than a curi-
ous relic. As Eric Lott suggests in his dazzling new book, Love and Theft:
Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class,1 its traces are every-
where: “Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version
of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious re-
turn.” And what is rock ’n’ roll if not white men trying on the accents of
“blackness”? One can hear blackface minstrelsy’s “wink at the counterfeit
alongside a nod toward ‘blackness”’ in Elvis’s recounting of what occurred
when he first began getting airplay: “You could hear folks around town say-
ing ‘Is he? Is he?’ and I’m going ‘Am I? Am I?”’ With his dyed, pomaded
hair, loud threads, black moves, white skin, and hybrid sound, Elvis was
nothing if not racially ambiguous. While he owed much of his popularity to
his race-bending, some whites, as Greil Marcus noted, found him “too
complicated . . . you couldn’t tell what he might be slipping over.”2
Were white rock ’n’ roll’ers’ appropriations of black style a form of cul-
tural plundering or a courageous violation of America’s color line? Was it
theft or love? In The Death of Rhythm and Blues, Nelson George, who calls
Elvis a “mediocre interpretive artist,”3 weighs in with a judgment only
This essay was previously published in the Village Voice, February 15,
1994.
slightly more generous than Public Enemy’s. But most historians of rock
have followed Greil Marcus whose 1975 essay, “Elvis Presliad” argued that
Elvis’s significance lay in his “nerve to cross the borders he’d been raised to
respect.”4 Like Marcus, most writers emphasize the syncretism of American
culture (and the resulting difficulty of labeling music black or white). They
stress the challenge that race-bending white rockers posed to the American
color line. George Lipsitz,5 for example, contends that white, middle-class
kids’ embrace of rock ’n’ roll in the fifties represented a rejection of the
segregated suburbs and a yearning for the heterogeneity of the industrial
city. With the ascendance of cultural studies, a field eager to find subversion
everywhere, there’s been a proliferation of upbeat, against-the-grain read-
ings of rock ’n’ roll with the result that the most provocative work on rock
has failed to explore the ambivalence and complexity that informed these
border crossings.
For Lipsitz, Johnny Otis embodies the progressive impulse of early rock
’n’ roll. In contrast to Elvis, whose race bending was all about the wink and
the nod, Otis not only crossed the border but courageously stayed on the
other side. Fronting one of the most successful rock ’n’ roll bands on the
West Coast, Otis racked up fifteen Top 40 R&B hits between 1950 and 1952.
He discovered and produced Little Esther Phillips, Big Mama Thornton,
Little Willie John, and Three Tons of Fun. In the ’50s he had shows on three
L.A. television stations and promoted rock dances. These mixed dances
were such an affront to L.A.’s color line that local authorities forced Otis to
move them to nearby El Monte.
As his memoir Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue6
demonstrates, Otis was an important (and largely unheralded) pioneer of
rock ’n’ roll. But what makes Otis so compelling to anyone arguing for rock’s
subversive power is his renunciation of whiteness. Born Johnny Veliotes,
Otis was the son of Greek immigrants who lived in a predominantly
African-American neighborhood in Berkeley, California. His visits to
“sanctified” black churches and exposure to the black community con-
vinced him, he said elsewhere in an interview, that black culture was “rich-
er and more fulfilling and more natural.” Indeed, black culture “captured”
him. He married a black woman, settled in the black community and began
to identify himself as black. He also became a tireless fighter in the struggle
against racial discrimination. Although no one went as far (and with such
White Faces, Black Masks 195
integrity) as Johnny Otis, many early white rock ’n’ roll performers, pro-
ducers, songwriters, and DJ’s “went black,” as it were. It may have been the
Beats who caught Norman Mailer’s attention in his 1957 essay “The White
Negro,” but Otis and Elvis many other rockers made the racial Maginot Line
more porous than Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady ever would.
As Lipsitz explains in his incisive introduction to Upside Your Head!,
Otis’s understanding of race is more cultural than biological. In contrast to
the White Negro jazzman, Mezz Mezzrow, Otis doesn’t believe that exposure
to the black community darkened his skin and “burred” his hair. Rather, he
defines himself as “Black by persuasion.” Lipsitz assures us that Otis un-
derstands there are “some dimensions of the African-American experience
he cannot feel,” and that he has had the “theoretical option of living as
‘white.”’ Curiously, Otis doesn’t acknowledge this or explore his complicat-
ed racial identity anywhere in Upside Your Head!. While his wonderful evo-
cations of L.A.’s rock ’n’ roll world and the eighty-odd pictures document-
ing it make the book required reading for anyone interested in rock’s
history, it sheds little light on this particular question. We’re left wondering
what his willed blackness really meant for him. Those who want to see in
Otis’s life an affirmation of poststructuralist theorizing about identities as
“labile sites of contestation and negotiation” will be disappointed by this
book. For Otis doesn’t so much defy racial categories as revalue and reify
“blackness.” He denounces white musicians who try to play “black” music
as “copycats” who invariably get it “Bassackwards.” He complains that
today’s black performers are “pathetically bland” by comparison to those of
his generation. In the end, Otis’s declension narrative enshrines a particu-
lar kind of “blackness,” one whose authenticity is implicitly understood.
No one could charge scholars of blackface minstrelsy with ignoring its
underside. Most recent work on the subject has characterized it as yet an-
other instance of racial domination. In Love and Theft, Lott complicates the
picture considerably by showing that blackface performance involved “the
dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy, moments of domina-
tion and moments of liberation, counterfeit and currency . . . all constitut-
ing a peculiarly American structure of feeling.” Lott argues blackface sig-
naled “panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure” more than “absolute white
power and control.” While most writers have emphasized performers’ con-
tempt for black culture, Lott claims their contempt often masked their real
interest in “blackness.” Blackface minstrels did, after all, engage and in-
habit “blackness,” if only to cross back over into “whiteness.”
And in the industrializing, antebellum North where blackface devel-
oped, the distance between “whiteness” and “blackness” was not always so
vast. Lott contends the overlapping racial and class codes of blackface reveal
the extent to which Northern blacks and working-class whites shared a
common culture. Early blackface minstrelsy made tentative connections
between the brutality of the shop floor and the plantation, and often articu-
lated class difference by using the “insurrectionary resonances” of black
culture. But if interracial contact could promote solidarity of sorts across
the racial divide it could also generate anxiety among working-class whites.
Lott argues that capitalist consolidation and class stratification further un-
settled Northern white working-class men’s precarious racial identity. By
the 1840s blackface “substitute[d] racial hostility for class struggle” as
white working-class unity was achieved “over the bodies of black people.”
Or, the bodies of black men. For, as Lott shows, “blacking up” also in-
volved a “manly mimicry” of black men, who exist as a hypersexualized car-
icature in the white imagination. Lott suggests that we can see the contours
of masculine whiteness taking shape in blackface performers’ “clumsy
courtship of black men.” This fascination with blackness is, Lott argues, in-
separable from industrial capitalism’s new moral order, which required ab-
stemiousness from the white working class. Ambivalent about their own de-
sire, whites imagined the Other had stolen it. Fantasies about blacks’
“special, excessive enjoyment” allowed the pleasure to return, nowhere
more so than in blackface where white workingmen both “take their enjoy-
ment and disavow it.”
In complicating blackface, Lott never loses sight of its devastating con-
sequences for blacks, especially black performers trying to “repossess the
means of cultural representation.” When blacks began performing black-
face they were unable to break from established minstrel types because they
had to meet the ideological imperatives of the minstrel show. These min-
strel types proved enormously resilient, so much so that Johnny Otis recalls
hearing older black musicians talk about having had to blacken up and en-
gage in “overt Uncle Tomming.” Although black musicians are no longer re-
quired to darken up as the light-skinned Billie Holiday was when she played
Detroit in the 1930s with the all-black Basie band, they are nonetheless ex-
White Faces, Black Masks 197
pected to be recognizably “black.” Black artists who defy the tests of “black-
ness”—that they embody sensuality, spontaneity, and gritty soulfulness—
may achieve superstardom, but they often find their racial crossings leave
them open to charges of self-loathing and selling-out. Race-bending white
musicians, by contrast, are hailed for their brave transgressions.
In this remarkable book Lott maps white masculinity, explicates the in-
terconnectedness of race, gender, and class, and provokes us to consider
the ways in which love and theft still inform cultural commerce across the
color line. While the music and the styles have changed since Otis “went
black” fifty years ago, recent developments in rap point to whites’ continu-
ing fascination with black masculinity. Lott’s commitment to connecting
the cultural and the political, and to exploring rather than castigating the
structure of feeling behind blackface, make Love and Theft a model for how
to study popular culture.
13
The Refuge of the Lions’ Den:
An Interview with John Paul Hammond
I
n the annals of rock ’n’ roll,
1965 stands as a watershed, the
year Bob Dylan went electric at the
Newport Folk Festival, infuriating hardcore folkies and inspiring countless
others to plug in. Dylan’s electric turn brought about a sea change in popu-
lar music, but, in truth, he was a step behind John Paul Hammond. By 1965,
the college student-turned-blues musician had already cut one electric
album, 1964’s Big City Blues, and recorded another, So Many Roads, with the
Hawks, a Canadian group later famous as the Band. In fact, it was Ham-
mond, not Dylan, who brought the Hawks to America. And it was Hammond
who in 1966 discovered Jimi Hendrix in the dumpy Café Wha! playing songs
from So Many Roads. Hammond brought Hendrix to the “up-market” Café
Au Go Go, where Hendrix backed him up and “stole the show.” The rest was
history . . . for Hendrix.
Stardom has eluded Hammond, but over the last thirty years he’s been in
the thick of things, playing with Hendrix, John Lee Hooker, Michael Bloom-
field, and the Band. Although Hammond seemed poised to break out in the
late ’60s and early ’70s, it never happened. In 1973, he formed a super-
group, Triumvirate, with Mike Bloomfield and Dr. John. “But,” Hammond
recalls, “three days into the tour, Clive Davis was fired, Columbia became
the target of an FBI drugola investigation, and every project the company
had was frozen. So the album never got any promotion, the tour was can-
celled. I said, ‘Forget it,’ and I returned to solo performing. I had my hopes
This essay was first published in somewhat different form in the L.A. Week-
ly, August 18, 1995.
The Refuge of the Lions’ Den 199
so high.” Speaking like a bluesman, Hammond reflects, “You have to take a

loss as a lesson.”
When he was starting out, Hammond, like most other young white folk
and blues artists, played acoustic guitar. After leaving Antioch College in
1962, he traveled to Florida, where John Hammond Sr., the legendary Co-
lumbia Records producer, claims his son acquired a pair of “blind man’s
glasses and a tin cup, and took to the streets to play the blues.” According to
his father, Hammond felt that “only by disguising himself would he be al-
lowed to enter black taverns.” Hammond denies he ever tried to pass himself
off as blind or that he carried a tin cup, but he does admit he bought a pair of
big, round, sunglasses that he thought were “pretty cool.” He soon became
friends with a local harp player who took Hammond to a “juke joint where I
guess they thought I was cute. After I played, I passed around my hat.”
Hammond officially began his career in Los Angeles, not back east or in
the midwest. “It was a whole new world and I was going to be a new person.
I was going to be a blues singer.” Not incidentally, L.A. was also “as far away
from home as possible.” His first gigs were at the Ash Grove, L.A.’s leg-
endary boho coffeehouse. Hammond loved Ed Pearl’s Melrose Avenue cof-
feehouse and returned there often, including one memorable visit in 1965.
After closing out his set with Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues,” Ham-
mond walked backstage, where the middle-aged headliner growled at him,
“Come here and sit down. Where the fuck did you learn to play that?” He
wasn’t the first to wonder how a white boy like Hammond came to sound like
Robert Johnson reincarnated, but Howlin’ Wolf was surely the most physi-
cally imposing person to have ever posed the question. After Hammond ex-
plained he’d taught himself the song by listening to the record, Wolf de-
manded he play it again for him “right now.” Afterward, Hammond
remembers, Wolf said, “Man, that’s evil.”
We can’t know whether the evil lay in Hammond’s playing or the whole
package. But Wolf seems to have been more ecumenical than proprietary
when it came to that vexed question of who can play the blues. Wolf made a
point of telling people that his mentor, the early bluesman Charley Patton,
was part Indian, and he always claimed white country singer Jimmie
Rodgers as an influence. “I wanted to yodel [like Rodgers] in the worst way,”
he explained, “and all I could do was make a howl.” Wolf may not have seen
the blues as the exclusive preserve of African Americans, but, then, it’s also
true that in 1965 the idea of whites playing the blues was still largely hypo-
thetical. After all, besides Hammond, there were only a handful of white
guys—most notably, Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield in Chicago, Eric
Von Schmidt in Cambridge, John Fahey on the West Coast, Johnny Winter in
Texas, and John Koerner, Tony Glover, and Dave Ray in Minneapolis—play-
ing the blues. Newport changed all that, sparking the blues revival of the
’60s. After Dylan, the most controversial act at Newport ’65 was the Paul
Butterfield Blues Band whose electric set precipitated a ludicrous wrestling
match between blues-purist and musicologist Alan Lomax and Albert
Grossman, who managed both Paul Butterfield and Bob Dylan. To Lomax,
everything about the Butterfield Band—from their amps to their (mostly)
blue eyes—was an affront. Above all, he hated what he thought they signi-
fied: the commercial viability and artistic debasement of the blues.
Like other white players, Hammond encountered resistance from blues
purists. He laughs at Koerner, Glover, and Ray’s retort: “Who says we can’t
sing good blues because we’re on the wrong end of the Mississippi?” But
thinking back on those years, Hammond marvels at his luck. Pop Staples
took him aside after one of his first nights at the Ash Grove and said, “Man,
I don’t know where you learn this stuff, but don’t ever stop doing it.” Ham-
mond admits, “I’m so fortunate I didn’t get my feelings hurt badly, because
I was so sensitive at that point, so uptight about playing. And I walked into
the lion’s den, in a way, by playing the blues. I didn’t say I was a folk singer;
I said, ‘I’m a blues singer.”’ Hammond wasn’t like his friend Michael
Bloomfield, who was apparently fearless about getting up onstage and jam-
ming with his idols Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
Of course, Bloomfield hadn’t grown up with John Hammond Sr. as his
father and Benny Goodman as his uncle. During his many years at Colum-
bia, Hammond Sr. signed Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Lester Young, Aretha
Franklin, Bob Dylan (best known around Columbia after his signing as
“Hammond’s folly”) and Bruce Springsteen. Hammond Sr. was a music
maven who must have owned hundreds of records, but he rarely played any
for his son. And Benny Goodman, whom Hammond describes as “very
standoffish,” only showed up once to hear his nephew play, and left without
saying a word. So the Wolf’s world may have been the lion’s den, but it was
there, far from home, that Hammond came to “feel like somebody.”
14
“Play That Funky Music”:
An Interview with Lenny Kravitz
“
I
wanted to be a session player.
I never wanted to do this.” Lenny
Kravitz a reluctant star? A thwart-
ed studio musician? Maybe it’s the grueling interview schedule for his new
album “Circus” that provokes the thirty-year-old Kravitz into saying some-
thing so absurd. Or maybe it’s the nose-ring he broke getting out of bed this
morning. But the idea that this opinionated, headstrong, shoot-from-the-
hip musician ever aspired to be a sideman is preposterous. After all, this is
the guy whose 1993 hit “Are You Gonna Go My Way” opens with the boast
that he’s “the chosen” one who’s “come to save the day.” With his Luddite
views about recording and his fondness for vintage instruments and
sounds, Kravitz isn’t likely to go anyone else’s way.
Beginning in 1987 when he was signed by Virgin, Kravitz garnered a lot
of press, in part because of his high-profile marriage to actress Lisa Bonet.
But if the tabloids found him newsworthy, the rock press skewered Kravitz
for wearing his musical influences (Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, the Beatles and
Curtis Mayfield, among others) on his sleeve. Dubbed “retro,” he was dis-
missed as more “recreative” than creative. His work often sounds as if he
had ransacked classic rock and soul of the sixties and early seventies, but
what interests me about Kravitz is his rejection of the racial borders of pop-
ular music. Kravitz’s refusal to knuckle under and produce predictably
“black” music is something he shares with a growing number of African-
American artists, including Basehead, the recently reformed Fishbone and
the now-defunct Living Colour. In their indifference to the musical color
This interview first appeared in MTV Online, September 1995.

line, these musicians are truly the products of integration. As one self-de-
scribed black rocker put it, “Hendrix, the Doors, the Yardbirds, that’s part
of my culture too . . . We’re products of integrated schools and integrated
neighborhoods.” Kravitz may have listened to Motown and the artists of
Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records, but he also listened
to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, not to mention Jimi Hendrix, the obvious
prototype for artists looking to mix it up. Kravitz’s genre-busting has some-
thing to do with his background. His mother, actress Roxie Roker, who
played Helen on the seventies hit series “The Jeffersons,” is Bahamian and
his father, TV producer Sy Kravitz, is Jewish. He grew up first in New York
City and then in Los Angeles, where he attended Beverly Hills High.
Kravitz’s ecumenical approach has attracted a predominantly white au-
dience—a situation that stems in large part from today’s rigid radio formats.
He may have many more white than black fans, but Kravitz bristles at the
idea that his music is “white.” Like other race rebels, Kravitz inhabits a kind
of racial twilight zone. Black musicians, however, often find their excur-
sions across the color line criticized, not praised, and attributed to crass
commercialism, or worse, internalized racism. Perhaps because he’s sensi-
tive to the charge that he’s insufficiently “black,” Kravitz seemed deter-
mined in our interview to establish his roots in black music and culture.
Kravitz didn’t engage in any homeboy posturing, but from the musical he-
roes he listed to the L.A. soul food restaurant where we lunched, he seemed
to be saying, “this is my home, too.” With his print shirt (uncharacteristi-
cally buttoned up), tight leather pants, huge white-rimmed sunglasses, and
trademark dreads, Kravitz may look a bit like a “pimp from the planet Rasta”
but he’s far from flaky.
AE: You spent your childhood on both the tony Upper East Side and
funky Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. How did you come to inhabit such diver-
gent worlds?
LK: My grandfather and grandmother lived in Bed-Stuy and when
my mom got married she moved to the upper East Side with her hus-
band. At first I spent the majority of my time in Brooklyn with my
grandparents while my parents worked during the week. I’d see my
parents every day, though, because they’d come to Brooklyn for dinner.
And during the weekends when they were off I’d go with them. I went
“Play That Funky Music” 203
to preschool in Brooklyn, but once I started first grade I lived in Man-

hattan during the week and went to Brooklyn on the weekends.
AE: One of the most striking aspects of your work is your disregard of
musical boundaries.
LK: Yeah, I’ve taken so much shit for that. It’s ridiculous.
AE: I would imagine that your indifference to musical borders has
quite a lot to do with your childhood.
LK: Of course. I mean I had such variety in my life. It was like differ-
ent colors, different religions, different people, different neighbor-
hoods. I saw it all. And I heard it all. My parents and my grandfather
took me to everything from a rock concert to, say, James Brown at the
Apollo in ’69 when I was five years old. We would go see opera, ballet,
symphonies, and jazz. We used to go see Duke Ellington a lot and Miles
Davis. So instead of keeping me at home they took me out a lot. Also to
the theater because my mom was in theater. She was in the Negro En-
semble Company. She used to do poetry and Theater in the Park and
lots of off-Broadway stuff. Being around all these artists and musicians
like Sarah Vaughan and Miles Davis was incredibly important.
I didn’t realize what I was seeing when I saw it, but somehow it all
ended up in my subconscious. I absorbed it.
AE: You’ve said that at a certain point your exposure to this artistic
community ended. Did it coincide with your move to L.A.?
LK: Yeah, it began to end then. Producer Norman Lear saw my mom
on Broadway in “The River Niger” and asked her to come to L.A. and
then we all ended up out here. I was eleven and I felt really out of it in
L.A. Growing up in New York, I’d been walking the streets since I was
six years old. I walked to school. Kids in New York take the bus. Then
we moved here and, God, I couldn’t go anywhere unless someone drove
me. There was nobody playing out on the streets. I couldn’t walk any-
where. It was so strange. But also it was the lack of theater out here. It
wasn’t like New York where you get the Village Voice and you find a play
and you go see it. So it was the end of that.
AE: Your music owes quite a lot to the sixties. What do you find so ap-
pealing about that period?
LK: I’d probably say the freedom. I mean the freedom of expression.
There were always colorful people around playing instruments, doing
theater. My mom dressed really cool, lots of way-out clothes. People

ask me why I dress the way I dress. They thought I was trying to do a
“sixties” thing. But what I was really trying to do was my mother ’coz
she had all this cool stuff, you know, the great hats and jackets and
furs—the fashions of that time. When you’re young you don’t know
what’s in or out, all I knew was that’s how my mom dressed. I liked the
way she looked, I thought she was incredible. When she’d go out I used
to play in her clothes. I’d try on her boots and her coats and act like I
was a musician, the whole thing.
AE: Any musician in particular?
LK: The Jackson 5, completely. That was the group I was really into
when I was young.
AE: Speaking of the Jackson 5, I hear echoes of early seventies soul in
your music.
LK: That’s my favorite era of soul music—the early seventies. Such
beautiful free music. Such a groove. All the Motown stuff, Al Green,
Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, and Gamble and Huff.
AE: What do you think happened? Why do you believe the quality of
the music deteriorated?
LK: Technology. People like Aretha and Gladys Knight, who I adore,
making these weird records because they feel they gotta keep up when
they’ve already surpassed any limit. See, it’s all enmeshed with radio
now and they program the listeners. It’s a big brainwasher. And with
MTV, if you’re older now and you’re not what they say is attractive, you
ain’t gonna be on it, unless you’re Tony Bennett. But that’s not just
MTV, that’s media in general.
AE: Back to the sixties, it was a time when the color line was
breached, perhaps most of all, musically. But it wasn’t just white kids
turning on to black music, was it? There were lots of black kids listen-
ing to white music as well.
LK: Yeah, back then you look at the music charts. The Top 10: The
Supremes, the Temptations, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and
Mary, Simon and Garfunkel. It was this mixture. Now we got the black
chart, we got the white chart, and on and on.
AE: There was almost a meltdown of musical categories then.
LK: But you also had the phenomenon of black guys playing music,
“Play That Funky Music” 205
and no black people really showing up. Like Hendrix. I have that prob-
lem now. I wouldn’t say it’s a problem, but I find it odd.
AE: When asked about this a year ago you were quoted saying your
music is white.
LK: No, my music isn’t white at all! To begin with I have a soulful
voice. It’s that people have been brainwashed. You have white kids
growing up not knowing the history and thinking they invented rock
and roll. I’ve come across people who’ve said things like, “You’re black,
nigger, why are you playing our music?” I mean, white musicians in the
sixties did amazing things with black music. But the fact of the matter
is that black people did invent it.
And then you have black people . . . We’re throwing our own music
away. I don’t know why it is but you go to a blues concert or a jazz concert
I see mostly white people. It’s our music, how come we don’t support it?
We seem to always support what’s hip at the time. Believe it or not, there
was a funk festival at the Coliseum a few weeks ago with the Gap Band,
Chaka Khan, Bootsy, Zapp and Roger Troutman, the Bar-Kays—all these
incredible people. And you’d think the way rap is right now where all
they’re doing is sampling all this music, that all the kids who are into rap
would show up. But the place was empty. No one showed up. It holds
97,000 and there might have been 5,000 people there.
AE: So, even funk, which is all over the airwaves in the form of sam-
ples, is being abandoned. Or the artists are. In The Death of Rhythm and
Blues, critic Nelson George contends that black people have left behind
these older musical genres—a fact he bemoans—in part because “black
music is in constant flight from the status quo.” Blacks’ musical rest-
lessness, he argues, places a premium on the innovative and new.
LK: What’s new about it? Rap ain’t new. My grandfather can tell you
about people back then doin’ the rhyming.
AE: You’ve been in the vanguard of the low-tech move with your use
of vintage instruments and low-tech, analog recording. You even own
the Beatle board—the original mixing console used by the Beatles to
record a number of their albums. Yet most people attribute the low-
tech trend to grunge.
LK: Yeah, but you know what? A lot of the music you would think is
grunge is really recorded more slick than you think. The guitars are
loud and distorted, but they don’t do it the way we do it. And they all
sound the same—all those records. They all use the same gear and
model after each other.
AE: San Francisco engineer Fred Catero, who’s worked with Bob
Dylan, Janis Joplin, Laura Nyro, and Santana, recently said that “forty
years ago music was ‘created’ by musicians playing in real time in the
studio. Today most recordings are ‘manufactured’ with the help of the
engineer, allowing many performers who previously wouldn’t have
stood a chance in the studio to turn out incredibly impressive albums.”
LK: These kids today could not handle the players back then. When
you think about Motown, for example, you had to play good, you had to
sing good, you had write good, you had to perform good. People had to
be so polished and professional. Now you get some kid who can barely
squeal out a sound and knows a chord or two and he can be a big, huge
star. But nothing grooves like a human being who has the groove.
James Brown is the prime example. That band locked. Funky—tight,
but loose. Some bands play so tight they’re like anal, they’re weird. But
not James Brown—those guys were on fire. And a computer can’t do
that. It has no soul.
15
“The Soul of a Martian”:
A Conversation with Joni Mitchell
B oth of us are apprehensive.

I wonder, what if she’s aloof and
bored? Or worse, a Scientologist?
This isn’t some abstract worry, mind you. Joni Mitchell and I are doing this inter-
view at the Manor Hotel, which is part of the behemoth Church of Scientology
Celebrity Center on the corner of Franklin and Bronson in Hollywood. The hotel is
open to the public, but the first floor is a virtual shrine to L. Ron Hubbard. First you
pass a museumlike display of the Great Man’s study, and then you enter the lobby,
where a small baby-grand piano churns out schlocky ballads as if it were sere-
nading the nearby bust of L. Ron. “Why are we here?” I want to ask her. Instead,
I wait and ask her publicist, who assures me the photographer chose the site. When
I see Mitchell a week later, she laughs, “I heard you were checking up on me to see
if I’m a Scientologist.”
After we’re introduced, her smile fades into something else—worry, maybe.
But her apprehension evaporates as soon as she begins to feel she’s “going to get a
fair shake,” as she later puts it. I’ve brought four pages of questions, and after
about an hour and one page, I worry out loud, “I’m going to wear you out.” “No
way, I’m a talker,” she insists. And what a talker! Disarmingly honest, Mitchell
speaks quickly and precisely, all the while chain-smoking and looking directly at
you. The interview seems to energize her. As I’m getting ready to leave and making
small talk with her manager and publicist, Mitchell bounds down the stairs,
squeezes my shoulder, and tells them to send the (mythical) next journalist up.
Later, she told me she’d gone to bed that night remembering stories she’d begun
This essay was previously published as “Thirty Years with a Portable Lover”
in the L.A. Weekly, November 25, 1994.
but hadn’t finished. I went to bed thinking maybe I should write a biography of
Joni Mitchell.
“my music is not designed to grab instantly. It’s designed to wear for a
lifetime, to hold up like a fine cloth. If you’re in the right place, these
records are waiting to go off in your life, you know. But if you’re in the wrong
space, which, luck of the draw, for the last twenty years I seem to have had
reviewers in the wrong space . . . and I’ve been trashed for too long. The final
insult is to watch my imitators elevated while I’m still being trashed. So if I
don’t get my just dues soon, I’m going into hermitdom. Fuck you all. [laugh-
ing] I’m going to take up my brushes. I don’t care.”
Joni Mitchell, the queen of rock twenty years ago, can afford to laugh be-
cause she knows hermitdom is not in the cards for her. The critical and
commercial black hole she entered in the late ’70s when she moved from
pop into what she calls the “forest of jazz,” is behind her. Even if she now
prefers painting to music, as she claims, the buzz won’t let her put down her
guitar. After years of bad press, the musician whose mid-to-late ’70s exper-
iments with jazz and world music anticipated those of Sting, Peter Gabriel,
and Paul Simon, is finally beginning to get her due.
The elegantly minimal Turbulent Indigo, her new release on Warner
Reprise, has been getting good notices. KCRW deejay Chis Douridas helped
lay the foundation, giving the disc lots of airplay. Suddenly, Mitchell, who
told me, “If it’s hip it’s too late for me,” finds herself, well, hip. Everyone
from the usually crusty Chrissie Hynde (“We want you, Joni”) to the acid-
tongued Sandra Bernhard (“Joni’s awesome”) is invoking her name. And
after years of omission from the by-now obligatory “Women in Rock” arti-
cles, Mitchell is now appearing alongside the more predictable, even
canonical, figures—Patti, Chrissie, Joan, and Janis. Although a weak back
(the result of childhood polio—the same epidemic that hit fellow Canadian
Neil Young), the expense of staging a tour (she made less than her roadies
on the last one), and negative press have kept her off the road since 1983,
Mitchell says she is now “itching” to perform again.
The turnaround began several years ago when artists as varied as Prince,
Jimmy Page, and Seal began citing Mitchell as an important influence.
Younger female singer-songwriters such as Tracy Chapman, Sinéad O’Con-
nor and Tori Amos began paying homage to Mitchell around the same time.
“The Soul of a Martian” 209
With 1991’s wistful Night Ride Home the critical drubbing began to let up—
after a very long sixteen years.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the critical abuse, Mitchell has a
healthy ego regarding her work. Friend David Crosby was exaggerating when
he (affectionately) called Mitchell “about as modest as Mussolini,” but it’s
true that she exhibits none of the modesty or self-effacement that marks
many female performers. She believes her music has a place in music his-
tory, which is why she bristles when critics liken the new generation of fe-
male singer-songwriters to her. “When they start saying these girls are like
me, you know, you gotta get an education.” She calls herself a “composer in
the small, modern form,” and is quick to point out that, unlike most musi-
cians, she’s made fourteen albums (including her debut effort, which David
Crosby “pretended” to produce) without a producer. “People assume Henry
Lewy, my engineer, was my producer, but it’s not true.” Mitchell’s sense of
herself, her refusal to submit to the critical disparagement of her late
’70s/early ’80s records, doesn’t sit well with all reviewers. After noting her
dismissal of some critics as “jackasses” and “idiots,” the Los Angeles Times’s
Robert Hilburn recently observed, “Mitchell’s outbursts are likely to be fol-
lowed by disarming giggles—as if she’s surprised and amused at her own
bratty language.”
Although she’s not bratty, and doesn’t giggle, Mitchell is opinionated,
and she cracks up a lot. She doesn’t behave like a celebrity. Indeed, Mitchell
may be a diva about her work, but there’s no haughtiness in her demeanor.
When asked if she’s listened to Hole or L7, she replies, “No, should I? I
mean, if they’re good I should.” She’ll tell you she has more “armor” now
than she did in the early ’70s, when, as she told Rolling Stone, “I felt like a
cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” But she acknowledges still hav-
ing “sensitive pockets.” In contrast to so many musicians, she cares less
about her self-presentation than her music. She is an artist who never com-
promised, whose creative restlessness took her places the critics and fans
refused to go, and she never gave up.
something is bothering mitchell tonight. Her parents have let her

know she’s “disgraced them in front of all of Canada” during her recent ap-
pearance on Much Music, Canada’s music-video channel. Mitchell never set
out to offend them. In fact, in 1979 she admitted to one interviewer that she
has sometimes been less than completely candid with the press to protect her
very “old-fashioned and moral” parents. Mitchell joked, “I keep saying,
Momma, Amy Vanderbilt killed herself. That should have been a tip-off that
we’re into a new era.” That she was still struggling with these issues when she
was thirty-six isn’t so surprising. Watching Joni Mitchell, now fifty-one years
old, grappling with parental disapproval is both wonderful and terrifying.
Before the show, the producers gave Mitchell some sake to warm up her
vocal cords and control her jitters. “I entered the room with a pretty glowy
and goofy spirit. It began so lightly that to gear down into the spirit to sing
these tragedies that I write was pretty tricky stuff.” During a phone-in seg-
ment, after her first set, an earnest young woman asked if she was “proud to
be a Canadian.” Mitchell, who divides her time between L.A. and British
Columbia, didn’t give an easy answer. She spoke of her “annoyance” with
“borderlines”—“clogged arteries,” she called them— and jokingly termed
herself “bi-national.” After expressing her affection for Canada, she said
she preferred warmer climates. “The cold [Canadian] winters and Scottish
and Irish blood [not coincidentally, perhaps, her mother’s ethnicity] cre-
ate an emotionally withholding people.” Mitchell was trying to convey the
complexity of her feelings. “I feel I’ve been damaged by the culture I came
from, yet I love it so much.” She closed the show with “Happiness Is the
Best Face Lift,” a new song inspired by an argument with her mother about
the propriety of her “shacking up” with her lover in her home town. Before
singing it, though, she said, “Momma, if you’re listening tonight, I love you
so much.”
It was a tender performance that revealed Mitchell’s warmth, vulnera-
bility, thoughtfulness, and humor. Although the show generated no negative
response, even from Canadian nationalists, her parents were ashamed to
see their daughter smoking and singing songs with an occasional curse
word. The taping was an occasion Mitchell should have been proud of, but
instead of reveling in her success Mitchell seems unable to shake the par-
ental rebuke.
“I’m almost tempted to give them the opportunity to disown me. Yeah,
it’s too stressful. The last thing I want to do is bring them disgrace, but to
fully be myself in the world, apparently that’s the effect.” Speaking of her
performance, she says, “I’m an iconoclast by nature, but in the process I
also deglamorize myself. I’ve always tried to do that so I can walk around.”
Mitchell’s decision to recount this incident (in slightly different versions

twice during the interview) was perhaps another way of deglamorizing her-
self. After all, what could be more leveling than the disclosure that she too
gets reprimanded by her parents?
But the story is significant in other ways. It was, after all, the suggestion
that she was somehow too American that “pushed her button.” Mitchell has
made a career of assailing various borderlines—the borders separating jazz,
rock, and pop, and, more tentatively, those dividing black from white, and
male from female. And there was something else in the story—the connec-
tion between integrity and exile. For Mitchell, being herself involves being
disowned, orphaned, and exiled. It’s not accidental that “Joni (After Van
Gogh),” the self-portrait that graces Turbulent Indigo, appropriates Van
Gogh’s famous self-portrait, substituting Mitchell’s face. Mitchell has her
sanity, several homes, both ears, and a record label, but, like Van Gogh,
she’s found her work passed over in favor of “the nice and the normal.” But
if being “orphaned” was “hurtful,” she admits, “it was also, in a certain way,
freeing.” Nor has it interfered with her sense of humor. On Much Music,
Mitchell announced that a “mini-ear” would, “like a Cracker Jack prize,”
fall out of the first 10,000 copies of her new CD.
born roberta joan anderson, Mitchell grew up in Saskatoon, a small, dry

Canadian prairie town founded by the Ontario Methodist Colonization So-
ciety in the late nineteenth century. As a teenager, Mitchell developed a
passion for painting, rock ’n’ roll, jitterbugging, and all-around carousing.
Although John Lennon once chided her for being “overeducated,” Mitchell
not only flunked the twelfth grade; she never even finished her first year of
art school. She only began playing music because the art school she attend-
ed was “a joke.” In Canada, as in Britain, art school often functioned as a
holding tank for those deemed academically ungifted. “We were stuck be-
tween cafeteria cooking and auto mechanics. The attitude was ‘they’re kind
of dim, so let’s give them a trade.”’
One of rock ’n’ roll’s many art-school émigrés (Lennon, Richards,
Davies, Townshend, Clapton, Page, and Bowie), she began performing in
folk clubs by 1964, after progressing from a $36 baritone ukulele to the gui-
tar, with the help of a Pete Seeger instruction record. The guitar, she claims,
transformed her into “an introvert.” Formerly a “good-time Charlie,” she
suddenly had “this portable lover, and I was all curled up around it in the
corner at parties. Putting two chords together was, like, oh my God! The
thrill of hearing a three-chord progression in the beginning cannot be
matched.” The one guitarist who she says influenced her was Elizabeth Cot-
ten (“Freight Train”), but “I couldn’t master her style of picking. My left
hand is impaired from polio, and my left thumb works in an odd way, so I
simplified the left hand with open tuning, which makes the guitar much
more orchestral.”
The other big influence was a folk singer she’d originally dismissed as a
Woody Guthrie clone. But when she heard Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth
Street,” it hit her—poetry and music could be combined. “I’d never heard
anger expressed in a song. And I thought, This means it’s wide open, you
can write about anything. It was brilliant.” She imitates Dylan’s contemptu-
ous, nasal style, but speeds it up, “You’ve got alotta nerve to say you are my
friend.” Mitchell points out they also share a similar approach to songwrit-
ing. “Dylan’s songs are theatrical, and my songs are theatrical. But most
songs are made for singers to sing, not actors to act. You almost have to
throw away your singing to concentrate [on giving] the words their right
reading. There’s no room for vibrato or singers’ tricks.”
Virtually all the white North American rock stars of the late ’60s started
out as folkies, and Mitchell was no exception. “Folk music was so easy I was
a professional in six months.” Mitchell’s songwriting distinguished her
from others in those days when “the folk world was divided into two camps.
There were the Gibson players, who were usually young Jewish kids, singing
black blues. And there were the Martin players who were usually WASP-y
and singing English ballads.” When she was first starting out she sang in a
very high soprano because she was “mimicking” female folk singers like
Joan Baez. But “it felt unnatural, and eventually became stressful.”
After moving to Toronto in 1964, she met and married the American folk
singer Chuck Mitchell, with whom she performed. Their marriage collapsed
in 1966, not long after they’d relocated to Detroit. She continued perform-
ing in boho folk clubs as a solo, and moved to New York, where she became
known to other folk singers like Judy Collins and Tom Rush, who began cov-
ering her songs. Mitchell was making about $15 a night, which, she notes,
was “pretty good pin money in those days.” To hear her describe those
times, it’s clear she enjoyed mixing with the audience, even if she didn’t al-
ways share their assessment of her work. “You’d go out and eat with people
who’d say things like ‘Gee, you’re as good as Peter, Paul and Mary, and you
don’t even have a record deal.”’
By the mid-’60s, in the wake of Dylan’s electric turn and the next-new-
thing, folk rock, “Nobody wanted to hire a folk singer. Folk music was dead.”
Serving as her own manager, she turned down “slave labor” deals with Elek-
tra and Vanguard. Even after she acquired a manager, Elliot Roberts, who in
1967 got her a contract with Reprise, she still assumed she might have to re-
turn to selling women’s clothing—a job she’d held as a teen. Her Reprise
contract was, she claims, “a terrible deal. But most deals for first-time
artists are terrible. It’s like sharecropping, because everything is billed back
to you. It’s amazing how much money I have made given how bad the deals
have been.”
Mitchell moved to L.A., where boyfriend David (“The Byrd That Got
Away”) Crosby staged impromptu performances before his famous friends.
Peter Fonda recalls Crosby stopping by one afternoon with Mitchell. After
borrowing Fonda’s 12-string guitar, “she detunes the fucker and then plays
13 or 14 songs, warbling like the best thing I’d ever heard in my life.” Asked
if she was nervous about performing before the likes of Fonda, she says,
“Yeah, I was round-shouldered shy. But it had nothing to do with them
being famous. I was intimidated by them because they were people.”
Through the efforts of Crosby and deejay B. Mitchell Reid, people in L.A.
knew of her before her first album was even released in March 1968. Al-
though Mitchell was developing her own unique style on her first three al-
bums, she was still somewhat in the shadows of those covering her songs.
All that changed with her fourth album. 1971’s Blue, a painfully honest
post-mortem of the giddy highs and devastating lows of romantic love, was
a critical and commercial success. “At that period of my life, I had no per-
sonal defenses . . . There’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals,” which is
why Blue remains one of the great breakup albums of all time. For the Roses,
her follow-up, took aim at the music industry, but was centrally, as always,
about the travails of love. It, too, was lavishly praised.
amid all the accolades, about the only sour note was John Lennon’s ad-
monishment, “Why do you let other people have your hits for you? You want
a hit, don’t you? Put some fiddles on it.” As Mitchell noted years later, “He
said this about Court and Spark, mind you.” The jazzy, rocking 1974 album
was a huge success. If there was the usual angst and self-doubt, there was
also greater compositional complexity and more humor. Court and Spark
topped the Village Voice critics’ poll and yielded two Top 40 singles. The
Voice’s hypercritical Robert Christgau rated her the “best singer-songwriter
there is right now.” From 1971’s Blue through 1974’s live Miles of Aisles,
Mitchell experienced the Roar.
And, then, she says, “because I suddenly had commercial success, it was
time to get my ass, period. And that’s what happens to artists, period.” She
maintains she would have been creamed even had she continued working
the same ground. Mitchell is probably right that her run was up, but she also
made a decision, as she admits, to move on. There’s a telling moment on
1974’s Miles of Aisles when an exasperated Mitchell delivers a good-humored
retort to fans shouting out their requests. “No one ever said to Van Gogh,
‘Paint a Starry Night again, man.”’ Mitchell was letting fans know she would-
n’t become “a human jukebox.” In fact, by 1975 she had tired of fans’ expec-
tations that she “weep and suffer for them for the rest of my life. I had that
grand theme for a long time: Where is my mate? Where is my mate? Where
is my mate? I got rid of that one.” She now thinks, “There was a morbidity
to the public attention. The only saving grace was it was very well put. It was-
n’t just maudlin introspection, but it was a catalyst to a lot that was really
maudlin. That’s why the singer-songwriter [genre] was finally exhausted.”
Mitchell claims she originally became a “confessional poet” because “I
thought ‘You’d better know who you’re applauding up here.’ It was a compul-
sion to be honest with my audience.” But by the mid-’70s, Mitchell’s audi-
ence had grown far beyond anything she could have imagined when she was
still contemplating a sales career as her “ace in the hole.” Baring her soul no
longer narrowed the gap between performer and audience; it was, after all,
the source of her celebrity. Moreover, from the beginning, Mitchell’s con-
fessional songwriting fostered speculation about the identity of the
boyfriends behind all this romantic angst. In 1971, Rolling Stone proclaimed
her the “Old Lady of the Year,” and published a diagram revealing which of
her songs were about which of her famous boyfriends. Mitchell was so an-
gered by the sexist, tabloid-like treatment she refused the magazine inter-
views for eight years. “There were people on that list I was never with,” she
says, still irritated and hurt.
So on her follow-up to Court and Spark, 1975’s The Hissing of Summer

Lawns, Mitchell banished the “brokenhearted waif” of earlier albums. Al-
though the record reached No. 4 on the charts, fans and critics alike seemed
to feel betrayed by Hissing, a dystopian view of suburbia rendered in the
sounds of cool jazz. “Self-conscious artiness,” wrote Ariel Swartley in
Rolling Stone. Mitchell believed the backlash had a lot to do with her decision
to write “social description as opposed to personal confession. People
thought suddenly that I was secure in my success, that I was being a snot and
was attacking them.” The photograph—a very L.A. shot of a long-legged,
glamorous Mitchell relaxing in a swimming pool—didn’t help.
Hissing was Mitchell’s “demand for liberty,” and in it she crashed
through the borderlines of pop and countercultural hip. In “The Boho
Dance” (“Nothing is capsulized in me/on either side of town/The streets
were never really mine/Not mine these glamour gowns”) the former
“Woodstock girl” challenged the orthodoxy of the counterculture, which
condemned her new sartorial stylishness because it fell “outside the hippie
uniform of rock ’n’ roll.” There were no signs of the terminally unhappy
hippie girl anywhere on this album, and, given the public’s fascination with
tortured and depressed artists, especially female artists (Plath, Sexton,
Holiday. Joplin, etc.), this was problematic.
While her next effort, the lush road album, Hejira, represented a return
to the personal, it was hardly a pop move. Although some critics, such as
Swartley, understood that it was about the “motion of the music,” which was
as “hypnotic” as the highways she sang about, others, such as The Voices’s
Perry Meisel, were contemptuous (“Mitchell lacks any real understanding
of what her work is and how it behaves”). Hejira marked the beginning of
her very fruitful four-album association with bassist Jaco Pastorius. “I was
already,” she says, “forming pretty strong opinions about what the bottom
end of the music should be doing.” Mitchell believed “the bass should not
only anchor the music, by playing the root, but wander up into the melody
register,” a style with which Pastorius was already experimenting. “Here
was a guy playing the way I dreamed of. He was a godsend.” Don Juan’s Reck-
less Daughter, the (sort of) collaborative Mingus, and the live Shadows and
Light solidified Mitchell’s status as “a person without a country. I was con-
sidered an expatriate from pop music.” Critics tagged her a pretentious
dabbler who had abandoned all semblance of melody.
Jazz purists took aim as well. Although Mitchell says it was Mingus who
approached her about collaborating, she believes she was perceived by some
as a “white chick,” and, worse, an “opportunist who’d come to exploit
Charles.” Ironically, Mitchell “was not a fan.” John Guerin, her drummer
and boyfriend, was incredulous when Mitchell told him of Mingus’s over-
ture to her. “ ‘You unconscious motherfucker. You don’t even like his music.
Why didn’t he come for me?”’ Mitchell maintains her music from this peri-
od was “not like jazz. Only the great jazz musicians could play it. A lot of the
lesser jazz musicians were annoyed by it too because it wasn’t like jazz.” This
refusal to subordinate her vision (and it is a vision—“I paint with notes”) to
the strictures of any genre infuriated some critics, who saw it as hubris.
In 1982, she left Elektra for her old friend David Geffen’s new label. But
the ’80s proved equally inhospitable as 1982’s Wild Things Run Fast was dis-
missed as “I Love Larry songs.” (During the recording she became involved
with bassist Larry Klein, whom she later married). If the political Dog Eat
Dog of ’85 was “adolescent,” 1988’s Chalk Mark in the Rain Storm was “over-
produced.” Mitchell still bristles at the suggestion that Klein had “interior
decorated me out of my music.” Chalk Mark was, she explains, “a sonic ex-
periment in multiples. On most of the album, every guitar part was either 12
or 16 times one guitar. I was seeing how much I could add.” The nadir oc-
curred in 1990 when Geffen briefly dropped Wild Things Run Fast and Dog
Eat Dog from its catalogue.
Compared to Mitchell’s ’80s albums, both Night Ride Home and Turbulent
Indigo sound scaled back, which befits albums that find Mitchell con-
fronting the sobering realities of middle age. Although Mitchell has said
Turbulent Indigo is about a quest for justice, it also deals with the finiteness
of life and love. (She and Klein broke up the day before they began record-
ing the album.) These are wonderfully warm and intimate albums, but it
would be a shame if the hoopla over them overshadows her more experi-
mental work. The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, and parts of her double-
LP, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, remain as compelling as Blue or Court and
Spark. In the late ’70s Mitchell dared to paint big, and the remarkable
chordal movement of her music is still astonishing.
Mitchell may soon release an album of covers, something she was con-
tractually prevented from doing in the past. She’d like to cover songs by
Cole Porter, Frankie Lymon, Edith Piaf, Chuck Berry, Noel Coward, and
Billie Holiday, among others. As for a box set, she groans, “Oh, God, I don’t
really want to do it. It will kill my catalogue. I’m going to have to take two
songs from each album. (This assumes a three-CD set of 30 songs. Mitchell
will do no more than 10 songs per CD because, she says, the artist is paid for
only 10 songs even if there are more.) “What two do I take from Court and
Spark? How would I reduce my entire repertoire down to thirty songs? And
they want outtakes, too. I don’t know how I’m going to do it.”
“i see like an alien. I don’t have the soul of a white woman. I have the soul
of a [pauses] Martian [laughing], because I wander through this world as if
I’m not of it, which is I suppose the perspective of an artist in the first
place—the alien outlook.”
Sometimes Mitchell hasn’t always even looked like a white woman. In
1977, she decided to go to the photo session for Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter
with “a trick up my sleeve.” Mitchell says this particular photographer “got
good pictures,” but could be brutal as he struggled to “undo [your] psychol-
ogy.” So, after her fourth costume change, she emerged as a black man.
Clueless as to her identity, people on the shoot came up to her and said,
“Can I help you?” The cover of Don Juan is that shot.
This was more than a trick, though. Mitchell’s exile from the land of pop
may explain why she feels a kinship with African-American artists whom
racism has relegated to the periphery. To her, the real geniuses of the twen-
tieth century are Robert Johnson, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Jimi Hendrix, and
her own musical love, Miles Davis. Mitchell talks passionately about the in-
justices suffered by black musicians. “I find it offensive to see certain white
artists praised and called geniuses when the person they’re emulating went
to the grave poor and hardly recognized. Look at Bird, you know. You hear a
lot of white saxophonists being called geniuses, and you say, ‘No, man,
they’re not the genius, Bird was the genius. He was the one that started it.’ I
hurt for Bird. I hurt for all the great ones who were never fully appreciated.”
Mitchell also feels black musicians have been more willing than their
white counterparts to credit her. “Sting won’t admit [my influence] to this
day. He will to me, but not to the press,” she laughs. Jimi Hendrix was, she
says, among those who have appreciated her. “There was a night in Ottawa
where Jimi knelt at my feet at the bottom of a very short stage and taped the
whole show with a big, cumbersome reel-to-reel. We were both freshly
signed to Reprise. He had finished a show at the Capital Theater at 10:30 and
he came to see my show. He came up and introduced himself to me: ‘Hi, I’m
Jimi Hendrix. Can I tape your show?’ Jimi was a unique guitarist, and I was
a unique guitarist. Everyone else was derivative of something. There are
never that many originals, and usually they recognize each other.”
There was Mingus, too, though Mitchell admits it’s “kind of a mystery”
why he sent for her. She suspects it had something to do Don Juan—both the
photos of her cross-dressed as a black man and her composition “Paprika
Plains.” But as well as they got on, they were, she explains, musically an
“odd match. He loved cacophony, and I don’t really.” Since Don Juan,
Mitchell has also worked with Wayne Shorter, whom she names “the great-
est living jazz musician.” Shorter allows Mitchell to edit his sax work when
he plays on her albums. “He knows I’m not going to make his performance
schizophrenic.” Mitchell reports that when he finishes playing, Shorter
(who is a fellow painter—thus, Mitchell claims, their rapport) “turns to me
and says, ‘I’m leaving now, you sculpt.”’
Yet Mitchell is one of the few white rock singers who hasn’t copped a
black vocal style. “Yeah, the universal rock ’n’ roll dialect is southern black,”
she observes. “It’s as affected as opera. Hardly anyone sings in their real
voice.” And, worse, “once white people started playing rock ’n’ roll, the
roll—the joy that [characterized] the tail end of the Swing Era—went out of
it.” Mitchell believes some black musicians are drawn to her work because
“I write like a black poet. I frequently write from a black perspective.”
In these days of hyperawareness about who can speak for whom,
Mitchell’s conviction that she writes like a black poet is, at best, unfash-
ionable. Everyone knows, or so we think, a white woman is a white woman,
is a white woman, is a white woman. More to the point, there is no single,
monolithic black perspective. Yet I understand the desire to breach the
boundaries of race and gender. I can see why Mitchell considers the praise
of an unnamed black piano player to be the “greatest compliment” she ever
received. “ ‘Joni,’ he said, ‘I love your music. You make raceless, gender-
less music.”’
“i hate to see chicks perform,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone. “Hate it . . .
because they whore themselves.”
“Even someone like Joni Mitchell?” asked interviewer Kurt Loder.
“Well, no,” Dylan replied. “But then, Joni Mitchell is almost like a man
[Laughs]. I mean, I love Joni, too. But Joni’s got a strange sense of rhythm
that’s all her own, and she lives on that timetable. Joni Mitchell is in her
own world all by herself, so she has a right to keep any rhythm she wants.
She’s allowed to tell you what time it is.”
Three years ago, when Mitchell was asked if she was offended by Dylan’s
remark, she said, “In a way he’s right. Music has become burlesque over the
last few years.” Today, she says, “It’s interesting that even for Bobby a cer-
tain amount of accomplishment makes you an honorary male even if you
don’t act like a male. We are living in a male world here.” Unlike some
women rockers, Mitchell freely admits that it’s not exactly a level playing
field out there. In the early ’70s, Reprise ran an ad campaign built around
the following copy: “Joni Mitchell Takes Forever,” “Joni Mitchell is 90%
Virgin,” and “Joni Mitchell Finally Comes Across.” “That’s what happens,”
she maintains, “when you don’t show your tits.” Worst of all was the Rolling
Stone diagram. “I was horrified to see my own generation turn on me like
that. I would have expected it from the one before. I thought, ‘Oh my God!
This whole thing is a ruse. There is no freedom for women. The madonna-
whore thing is never going to disappear.”’
Although Mitchell admits that she’s sometimes found that male musi-
cians have a hard time taking instruction from a woman, for the most part
music has offered her a refuge from the conventions of gender. In fact,
when I ask her why she became interested in music, she tells me a long, re-
vealing story about her childhood.
“It started in childhood. Play should be fun, that’s what it’s about, right?
Okay, I try to play with the girls. All their games are nurses, tea parties, and
dress-up. Sometimes we don’t have clothes to dress up in, so we do imagi-
nary dress. I’d say, ‘I’m wearing a gold lamé dress, and I’m Ginger Rogers,
and I’m descending a long staircase.’ ‘No, you’re not, I am.’ So even on the
level of imaginary play, there was a lot of irrational competition.
“So then I try to play with the boys. The boys play Roy Rogers and war.
Roy Rogers is the one that invents all the activities and chooses the site.
They choose a new Roy every day. So I say, ‘Let me be Roy.’ They say, ‘You
can’t ’cause you’re a girl.’ So Christmas comes and my parents say, ‘So, what
do you want.’ I say, ‘I want a Roy Rogers shirt and a Roy Rogers hat.’ ‘Oh
dear,’ says my mother. There’s a big conference with my father. ‘The girl
wants a Roy Rogers shirt.’ This is very bad. My father says, ‘Let her have it.’
So come spring when you get all your woolly layers off, here I stand in my red
Roy Rogers shirt, says ‘Roy’ right on it. And my red Roy Rogers hat, says
‘Roy’ right on it. And I’ve got all these places . . . I know this ravine that
would be just great . . . And I say to the boys, ‘Let me be Roy.’ ‘You can’t.’
‘Why not? ‘ ‘You’re a girl.’ ‘But, look, it says, Roy Rogers right here!’ ‘That
means you’re Dale Evans.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you’re wearing Roy’s clothes.’
‘Well, what does Dale do?’ ‘She stays home and cooks.’
“So now I find a piano prodigy, a young boy who can play very, very so-
phisticated classical music, and his friend who was studying voice. They
were both baby classical musicians. Because I was exposed to a lot of classi-
cal music, I began to dream I could play the piano. A desire to compose woke
up in me at about the age of eight. They were artists. And there was no role-
playing, so play was able to happen. Had that play not existed, it would have
changed my destiny.”
For Mitchell and many other female rock ’n’ rollers, music exists beyond
the familiar territory of gender, a kind of liberated zone. This is why she so
resents being categorized as a “female singer songwriter” who writes
“women’s songs.” And it’s why she wastes no time in explaining she’s no
feminist, even as she is acknowledging male dominance. It’s not simply that
feminism is “too radical” or “divisional,” or that she’s “never found a herd
she could raise her fist in the air with.” Perhaps more to the point, femi-
nism seems to grant too much power to gender. It involves returning to the
ghetto, that stifling world of girls playing dress-up. Mitchell isn’t alone in
this. Most women rockers see feminism reinscribing the very category
they’re trying to escape.
But if feminism, by necessity, involves mobilizing women on the basis
of their gender, it’s often to refuse the very category of woman. As cool as
many women rockers are to feminism, their new-found prominence would
be unthinkable without it. Feminism has transformed the ground upon
which we all walk. Of course, it does no good to condemn female musicians
for the distance they often put between themselves and feminism. After all,
Mitchell has addressed the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, the sexual
abuse of girls, and the battering of women on her last two releases. And she
doesn’t hesitate to say that the adjudication of her work is the one area
where she feels gender has worked against her. “Were I a male I think it
would have been different. The critics didn’t lump Dylan in with others”
they way they invariably have with her, she points out. Angry about one
critic’s dismissal of her mid-’80s work as “cranky,” she says, “Dylan is far
crankier than me, you know. Do they call Dylan cranky for making social
commentary? It’s like an angry man is an angry man, and an angry woman
is a bitch.”
“and what about joni? Why is everybody forgetting about Joni?” Chrissie
Hynde asked Rolling Stone recently. “Hell, she’s a fuckin’ excellent guitar
player, excellent. I don’t know any guitar players, any of the real greats, who
don’t rate Joni Mitchell up there with the best of them. . . . We want you,
Joni. Get out there. Put down your paintbrush for five minutes, please.”
Why had everyone forgotten about Joni? Even the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame recently passed her over for its 10th annual inductions. After all, in
contrast to most women singers of the ’60s and ’70s, Mitchell played the
guitar and the piano, and wrote her own material. Moreover, no one better
captured the dilemma facing women in the wake of feminism’s revival: how
to reconcile the desire for connectedness and intimacy with the equally
compelling desire for freedom and autonomy. While I don’t think
Mitchell’s serial monogamy (“I’ve had the equivalent of about five mar-
riages”) or her apparent childlessness (“Is my maternity to amount to a lot
of black plastic?” she once asked before she was united with her daughter,
whom she gave up for adoption when she was an infant) should afford her
special entry into the feminist-inspired annals of women-in-rock, you
might imagine that for some it might have.
But Mitchell’s problem is that she’s never been a bad girl. She was never
bawdy, tough, or obviously androgynous. Her one experiment in bending
gender and race went largely unnoticed, and, in any case, was never part of
her self-presentation. Although she believes a “good piece of art should be
androgynous,” her androgyny is revealed in her lyrics, the way she some-
times writes from the perspective of a man (“Free Man in Paris” or “The
Sire of Sorrow”). Finally, the music for which she is best known reveals a
vulnerability at odds with the angry riot-grrrl pose that’s been so in vogue.
Janis bared her soul, too, but then she was the rowdy bad girl of the ’60s. It’s
a shame because Mitchell often avoided casting herself as the wimpy girl
eager to glom onto a guy (“You said, ‘I’m as constant as a northern star.’/
And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness/Where’s that at?/If you want me I’ll
be in the bar.”’).
Reflecting on her exclusion from the ranks of the great “mothers” of
rock, Mitchell observes, “Because it’s a man’s business some women have
the mistaken idea they have to do what men do. Whereas, why can’t you
make strong music without losing your femininity? I mean, I think it’s silly
when a woman plays the guitar like it’s a big cock. I think it’s silly when men
play the guitar like a big cock. The guy who was the best at it was Jimi Hen-
drix. And he confided to me that he couldn’t stand it anymore.”
One moment Mitchell is talking about being one of the guys and making
genderless music, and the next she’s extolling the naturalness of gender.
Mitchell emphasizes, “I was always one of the boys,” but then quickly adds,
“I didn’t lose my femininity.” The story she then tells, however, reveals that
she sometimes did “lose” her femininity. “If I got too rough, I’d embarrass
the boys because they respected me. Although I was one of the boys, they
gave me a line out of their respect for me. On occasion I’d get caught up in
the spirit of their rough language, and you’d see, you’d embarrass them.” In
other words, it wasn’t that Mitchell had an unerring sense of where the line
lay, but that her male friends would let her know when she’d ventured too
far into their territory.
It is ironic, given Mitchell’s disdain for borderlines, that she, of all peo-
ple, should talk of obeying the line between femininity and masculinity.
But, ironic or not, she’s in good company. Women today find themselves at
some moments wanting to explode the very category of gender, and at oth-
ers returning to its familiar shelter. And we all have trouble locating the line
delineating the feminine from the unladylike. What’s too coarse, too sexy,
too bitchy, or too ambitious? Although Mitchell never transgressed the line
of feminine respectability the way the more celebrated bad girls of rock did,
she did cross it. Indeed, the critics’ trouble with Mitchell isn’t just that she’s
a woman. It’s also that she hasn’t behaved enough like a woman. She ranks
herself right up there with Hendrix, talks of her place in the history of
music, and, most important of all, has earned that place with the boldness
and originality of her work. In challenging the equation of greatness with
maleness, Mitchell is, unbeknownst to herself and all the young trouble
girls of rock, the baddest of them all.
notes
Chapter 1. Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury
1. Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” in Slouching Towards

Bethlehem (New York: Dell, 1968), 122.
2. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam, 1969);
Didion, Slouching. The most effective and affecting account of the
Haight from an insider is Peter Coyote’s memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall
(New York: Counterpoint, 1998), which focuses on the Diggers. Also
useful is Rolling Stone reporter Charles Perry’s The Haight-Ashbury: A
History (New York: Random House, 1984). Interesting but far from re-
liable is Emmett Grogan’s Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (New York:
Citadel Press, 1990), another account of life in the Diggers from the
man Peter Coyote called a “life star” as opposed to a “life actor.” A
thoughtful and skeptical account is political radical Warren Hinckle’s
“A Social History of the Hippies,” Ramparts, March 1967, reprinted in
Gerald Howard, ed., The Sixties: The Art, Attitudes, Politics, and Media of
Our Most Explosive Decade (New York: Pocket Books, 1982). For a com-
pelling fictional account, see Jennifer Egan, The Invisible Circus (New
York: Picador, 1995).
3. Carol Brightman, Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 120.
4. This essay draws on oral histories I conducted with over a hundred vet-
erans of Haight-Ashbury for my book, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life
and Times of Janis Joplin (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999).
5. For an account that treats the San Francisco rock explosion as a story of
lost innocence, see Joel Selvin’s informative book, Summer of Love
(New York: Penguin, 1994).
224 1. Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury
6. Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion (New York: St. Martin’s Press,

1992), 339.
7. Brightman, Sweet Chaos, 223.
8. I will be using Beat and beatnik somewhat interchangeably here be-
cause to many, including the wannabe beatnik kids who moved to
North Beach in pursuit of the Beats, the two seem to have not been par-
ticularly distinct. Of course, to mainstream America, the Beats were
beatniks, a term said to have been coined in the aftermath of Russia’s
Sputnik launch by San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen,
who thought that Beats were “far-out” like Sputnik. See Dennis Mc-
Nally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation and America
(New York: Delta, 1979), 253. Beats were quickly caricatured as “beat-
niks,” with Maynord Krebs of the Dobie Gillis show being America’s
best-known bearded boho. However, it’s recently been claimed that
African-American Beat writer Bob Kaufman, not Caen, coined the
term beatnik. See Mona Lisa Saloy, “Black Beats and Black Issues,” in
Lisa Phillips, ed., Beat Culture and the New America, 1950–1965 (New
York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996), 163.
9. Author’s interview with Peggy Caserta.
10. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam,
1987), 242.
11. Author’s interview with Bob Seidemann.
12. Wolfe, Electric Kool Aid, 121.
13. Quoted in Gitlin, The Sixties, 9.
14. Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside
Rock and Out (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 184. Coyote writes about
the free food distribution in his memoir. Digger Peter Berg was al-
ready familiar with some of the literature on post-scarcity society. At
some point, the Diggers called on the people of the Haight to “sew the
rags of surplus into tepees.” See Gitlin, The Sixties, 223.
15. Digger leaflet quoted in Perry, Haight-Ashbury, 97.
16. The phrase “anonymous good guys” was Didion’s, but this was most de-
cidedly not her view of the group: Didion, Slouching, 99. The phrase “hip
Salvation Army” was newspaper columnist Ralph Gleason’s. Although
Peter Coyote felt the phrase obscured the Diggers’ true radicalism, Peter
Berg thinks Gleason was trying to take the heat off the Diggers by mak-
1. Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury 225
ing them seem like selfless do-gooders: interview with Peter Berg.
Doubtless, some Diggers were more scrupulous than others.
17. My account of the Free Store is drawn from my interview with Peter
Berg; Coyote’s account in Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Pre-
sents, 184; and Emmett Grogan’s Ringolevio. According to Grogan,
“only a fraction of the goods used and accepted were secondhand and
they were made available and displayed to affect a Salvation-Goodwill-
salvage cover to conceal the fact that the rest of the stuff was new and
fresh and had been stolen.” Ringolevio, 249.
19. Author’s interview with Richard Hundgen.
20. Coyote, Sleeping, 138–39.
21. Author’s interview with Jim Haynie.
22. Quoted in Nicholas von Hoffman, We Are the People Our Parents Warned
Us Against (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), 131.
23. The phrase “civilian living” is Digger Emmett Grogan’s, who is quoted
in Coyote, Sleeping, 66.
24. Nat Hentoff, “We Look at Our Parents and . . .” New York Times Maga-
zine, Apr. 21, 1968: 19.
26. Perry, Haight-Ashbury, 7.
28. Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 295.
30. Ray Gosling quoted in Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popu-
lar Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 148.
32. Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades (New York: Summit,
1991), 102.
33. David Crosby and Carl Gottlieb, Long Time Gone: The Autobiography of
David Crosby (New York: Dell, 1988), 92.
34. Ibid., 83.
35. Ibid., 93.
36. McGuinn says that Dylan first heard their version in Los Angeles, not
New York. Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob
Dylan (New York: Penguin, 1986), 309.
37. Bob Spitz, Dylan: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 210.
38. Eric Von Schmidt and Jim Rooney, Baby Let Me Follow You Down: The Il-
lustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years (Amherst, Mass.: University
of Massachusetts Press, second edition, 1994), 240.
39. Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill (New York: Times Books,
1997), 9. My account of Newport ’65 is drawn from Goodman and from
Shelton, No Direction Home; Heylin, Bob Dylan; Michael Bloomfield’s
account in Ed Ward, Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American
Guitar Hero (New York: Cherry Lane Books, 1983); and my interview
with Peter Yarrow. For a behind-the-scenes account from the festi-
val’s production manager, see John Boyd’s letter to the editor in the
New York Observer, May 11, 1998. Although the Observer identifies him as
“John” Boyd, the production manager at Newport was Joe Boyd. See
Goodman, Mansion, 8.
40. Spitz, Dylan, 299.
41. Heylin, Bob Dylan, 147.
42. Author’s interview with Bill Belmont.
44. Ibid., 210.
45. Author’s interview with Chet Helms.
46. Author’s interview with George Hunter.
47. Author’s interview with Bob Cohen. The three-story Victorian with ten
one- and two-bedroom apartments at 2111 Pine Street was home to
everyone from Ronny Davis of the Mime Troupe to Janis Joplin. It was-
n’t located in the Haight, though it was close by.
48. The only political group considered part of the San Francisco rock
scene—Country Joe and the Fish—was a Berkeley band.
49. Author’s interview with Dave Getz.
50. Wolfe, Electric Kool Aid, 8. On the Bay Area’s avant-garde, see Richard
Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995). On the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, see Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Pre-
sents; R. G. Davis, The San Francisco Mime Troupe (Palo Alto, Calif.:
Ramparts, 1975).
52. Author’s interview with Alton Kelley.
53. Author’s interview with Peter Berg.

54. Gitlin, The Sixties, 223.
55. Grogan, Ringolevio, 238.
56. Author’s interview with Milan Melvin.
57. Author’s interview with Bob Simmons.
58. Michael Fallon, “A New Paradise for Beatniks,” San Francisco Examin-
er, September 5, 1965. The article was the first in a series on the
Haight. In the underground press “beatnik” continued to be used, too.
For example, in early 1967, before the Summer of Love made “hippie”
a household term, New York’s East Village Other published “What Is a
Beatnik?” in which sixth graders in a Lower East Side public school re-
sponded to said question. The article was reprinted in the Austin Rag 1,
20 (March 27, 1967): 8.
59. Crosby and Gottlieb, Long Time Gone, 69.
60. Hunter S. Thompson, “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of the Hippies,
New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967: 29.
63. In the spring of 1967, Ed Denson, who managed the Berkeley band
Country Joe and the Fish, groused, “I get tired of hearing about what
beautiful people we all are”: Thompson, “Capital of the Hippies,” 121.
64. Susan Gordon Lydon, Take the Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Survivor
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 74.
65. On November 12, 1966, over a thousand young people gathered on the
Sunset Strip in Hollywood to protest police enforcement of a 10 p.m.
curfew in that area, where the counterculture of L.A. had taken root.
The Strip was the scene of a series of demonstrations over the next
month and the situation remained tumultuous through February 1967.
Buffalo Springfield was a Los Angeles band whose guitarist, Stephen
Stills, was inspired by the Strip riots to write “For What It’s Worth.”
66. Author’s interview with Joshua White.
67. Darby Slick, Don’t You Want Somebody to Love: Reflections on the San
Francisco Sound (Berkeley, Calif.: SLG Books, 1991), 44.
68. By this point, Kerouac was leading a settled, suburban life and he felt
alienated from his Beat compatriots, or those who were seduced by the
sixties. He even referred to his friend Allen Ginsberg as a “hairy loss.”
Steven Watson, Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hip-
sters, 1944–1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 297.
69. Author’s interview with Diane Di Prima.
71. Philip Ennis, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American
Popular Music (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 334.
73. According to Peter Berg, the Diggers explained to Panther leader
Bobby Seale that the box of fish was a gift from them. When he asked
what kind of fish it was and was told it was sole, he said the fish was too
weird looking to be sole. In the end, he accepted their gift, though he
said the Party would verify the fish was truly sole. Peter Coyote writes
that the Panthers sought the Diggers’ help in starting a newspaper.
Coyote says the Communication Company, the public information arm
of the Diggers, printed the first and possibly second issue of the Pan-
ther paper. The Panthers, to the best of my knowledge, have never
written of these encounters.
74. Author’s interview with Bob Seidemann. Interviews with Peggy Caserta,
Carl Gottlieb, Dave Getz, and Richard Hundgen corroborated his view.
75. Hinckle, “Social History of the Hippies,” in Howard, Sixties, 225.
76. Quoted in Gitlin, The Sixties, 228.
77. Jack Kerouac, “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” Playboy, June
1959: 32. For an interesting account of the Beats, see the interview with
Neal Cassady’s widow, Carolyn Cassady, in Gina Berriault, “Neal’s
Ashes,” Rolling Stone, October 12, 1972: 32. Cassady maintains that all
the men “enamored of the Neal myth . . . never knew and don’t know
how miserable these men were, they think they were having marvelous
times–joy, joy, joy—and they weren’t at all.” See also Carolyn Cassady,
Off the Road (New York: William Morrow, 1990); Hettie Jones, How I
Became Hettie Jones (New York: Penguin, 1990); and the chapter on the
Beats in Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men (New York: Anchor,
1983).
78. Author’s interview with Bob Seidemann. Rifkin’s parents had been in-
volved with the old left.
79. Ibid.
80. Coyote, Sleeping, 288–89.
81. Didion, Slouching, 113.

82. Author’s interview with Travis Rivers.
83. Author’s interview with Carl Gottlieb.
85. My account of the Red Dog Saloon is drawn from: Travus T. Hipp, “Leg-
end of the Red Dog Saloon,” Edging West, June/July 1995, 20; Mike
Sion, “Capturing the Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon,” Reno
Gazette-Journal, March 17, 1994, 1E; Charles Perry, Haight-Ashbury;
Joel Selvin, Summer of Love; interviews with Bob Cohen, George
Hunter, and Alton Kelley.
86. The Charlatans really were the original San Francisco band. However,
the band’s founder, George Hunter, was an artist, not a musician.
When the group started out most of its members could barely play their
instruments and they were surpassed very quickly by groups with bet-
ter musicians.
87. Author’s interview with Bob Cohen.
90. Ibid., 30.
91. Author’s interview with Alton Kelley.
92. Selvin, Summer of Love, 28.
93. Slick, Somebody to Love, 56.
95. John Glatt, Rage and Roll: Bill Graham and the Selling of Rock (New York:
Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 31. The story is considerably more
complicated, and bears mentioning. While the Family Dog was still in
business it offered its services to Bill Graham. Luria Castell and Alton
Kelley offered to help Graham organize the Mime Troupe benefit in
exchange for a plug for the Family Dog on the poster advertising the
event. In the course of conversation, Castell and Kelley told Graham
about the Family Dog’s plans to hold dances in the old Fillmore Audi-
torium, which could be rented for just sixty dollars a night. A well-
known R&B venue, the Fillmore had fallen on hard times. Graham was
noncommittal about their offer of help, but before Castell and Kelley
secured the Fillmore, Graham had signed a four-year lease on the the-
ater. Kelley claims Graham’s actions “blew us right out of the water and
out of business. We didn’t know any other halls we could rent in San
Francisco for that price.” They held their last dance on February 4,
1966. Castell then sold the name “Family Dog” to Chet Helms.
97. Helms had bought the name “Family Dog” from Luria Castell and after
a short-lived and ill-starred partnership with Graham, opened up the
Avalon Ballroom.
98. Author’s interview with Peter Albin.
99. Steve Hochman, “Steve Miller,” Rolling Stone, September 2, 1993: 22.
Miller fronted a popular San Francisco band, The Steve Miller Blues
Band, which played the electric ballrooms, but Miller was at odds with
the prevailing ethos that favored improvisation and experimentation
over tight arrangements and skillful playing.
100. When the Jefferson Airplane first started performing, they were the
most polished band in the Bay Area, so much so that some San Fran-
cisco rockers felt they belonged in Los Angeles. Tellingly, the Airplane
turned determinedly anticommercial after the success of their hit LP
Surrealistic Pillow.
101. Author’s interview with Sam Andrew.
103. Author’s interview with Bill Belmont.
105. Allen Katzman, ed., Our Time: Interviews from the East Village Other
(New York: Dial Press, 1972), 208.
107. Ibid., 176.
108. Ibid. Redding’s manager Phil Walden, the speaker here, was describ-
ing the experience of Redding and other “black guys from the South”
who hadn’t spent any time around hippies.
109. L.A. record producer Lou Adler and John Phillips of the Mamas and
the Papas organized the event. For a full account of the festival’s ori-
gins, see Scars of Sweet Paradise, 162–63.
110. Goodman, Mansion, 52.
111. Robert Christgau, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music,
1967–1973 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), 121.
112. Goodman, Mansion, xi.

113. Author’s interview with Todd Schiffman, February 1996.
114. Frank Barsalona quoted in Glatt, Rage and Roll, 98.
115. Christgau, Any Old Way, 52.
116. Heimel, If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? (New York:
HarperCollins, 1992), 187.
117. See Goodman for an example of this analysis. For an even more damn-
ing understanding of the counterculture, see Thomas Frank, The Con-
quest of Cool (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997). Frank argues
that the counterculture was actually the invention of hip capitalists.
118. Richard Goldstein, Goldstein’s Greatest Hits (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1970), 119.
119. Heimel, If You Can’t Live Without Me, 188.
121. David Dalton, Piece of My Heart: A Portrait of Janis Joplin, rev. ed. (New
York: Da Capo, 1991), 164.
122. Lydon, Take the Long Way Home, 94.
123. Author’s interview with Linda Gravenites.
125. On “life” drugs versus “death” drugs: Two influential articles about the
Haight—Hunter Thompson’s New York Times essay and Warren Hinckle’s
article in Ramparts—claimed hippies made a different distinction: be-
tween “head” drugs and “body” drugs. Both writers categorize speed as a
“head” drug, as opposed to a bad “body” drug. See Hunter Thompson,
“Capital of the Hippies,” 122 and Hinckle, “Social History of the Hip-
pies,” in Howard, Sixties, 217. However, Chet Helms maintains that both
Thompson and Hinckle were outsiders, whose knowledge of the scene
was superficial. Speed, Helms insists, was not regarded as a good drug in
Haight-Ashbury.
127. Ibid.
128. Hinckle in Howard, Sixties, 213.
129. Certainly some people within the counterculture were made uneasy by
the Angels. Like his friend Janis Joplin, artist Jack Jackson was a trans-
planted Texan. “Janis and others thought that the Angels were part of
the whole crowd, but they weren’t,” says Jackson. “They had a lot of
hair, but they were the type of people we left Texas to get away from.”
Author’s interview with Jack Jackson.
130. Hinckle, in Howard, Sixties, 232.
131. Interview with Michael McClure conducted by Richard Ogar in
1968–1969, Manuscript Collection, Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley.
132. Coyote still holds to this position.
133. Author’s interview with Bob Brown.
134. Author’s interview with Bruce Barthol.
135. Jeff Jassen, “What Price Love?” Berkeley Barb 4, 18, issue 90 (May 5–11,
1967): 5.
137. Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 190. Bob Seidemann
shot a Summer of Love photo essay in which he recorded young people
making their journey up Haight Street. “You don’t see any hippies. You
see people looking for hippies,” he says. As the newcomers traveled up
the street they’d stop in boutiques so they could “get their act togeth-
er.” They’d buy an earring, then a groovy T-shirt, followed by a hip pair
of bell-bottoms. Author’s interview with Seidemann.
138. Davis, San Francisco Mime Troupe, 80.
140. Don McNeil, Moving Through Here (New York: Knopf, 1970), 136.
141. Ed Sanders, The Family (New York: Avon Books, 1972), 40.
142. Heimel, If You Can’t Live Without Me, 187.
145. Selvin, Summer of Love, 131.
146. Author’s interview with Raechel Donahue.
149. Christgau, Any Old Way, 254.
150. Digger Emmett Grogan dubbed it the “First Annual Charlie Manson
Death Festival” days before the concert took place. Graham and Green-
field, Bill Graham Presents, 294.

152. Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground
Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 226.
153. Coyote, Sleeping, 66.
155. Ibid., 226.
156. Even citizen-initiated recycling programs, which grew out of the
counterculture’s concern with the environment, have made millions
for waste management companies.
157. Simon Frith, “Rock and the Politics of Memory,” in Sohnya Sayres,
Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, Fredric Jameson, eds., The
’60s Without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), 61. In the end, however, Frith concludes that sixties rock was,
like all pop, primarily a “music of transitory private pleasures” rather
than revolutionary. See page 68.
158. Author’s interview with Judy Goldhaft.
159. Ellen Willis, “On the Barricades,” a review of The Sixties by Arthur
Marwick, New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1998: 16.
160. SDSers, for example, were often slow to experiment with drugs. Todd
Gitlin says there was “nothing hippie dippie” about SDS’s old guard.
He doubts anyone in this group, of which he was a part, had even sam-
pled LSD by 1967. Most, he reports, were “leery even of marijuana.”
Gitlin, The Sixties, 225.
162. Mario Savio, “An End to History,” reprinted in Alexander Bloom and
Wini Breines, eds. Takin’ It to the Streets (New York: Oxford, 1995), 111.
163. Author’s interview with Carl Gottlieb. Gottlieb is quoting a friend
here.
164. The phrase “superhypermost” was Janis Joplin’s.
165. Peter Coyote quoted in Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents,
197.
166. Slick, Somebody to Love, 63.
167. Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (New York: Vintage, 1991), 259.
169. Author’s interview with Carl Gottlieb.
234 2. The Ike Age: Rethinking the 1950s
Chapter 2. The Ike Age: Rethinking the 1950s
1. Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1986), 107.
2. Albuquerque Journal, September 19, 1998.
3. ABC was so confident of the public’s undying interest in the sixties that
during sweeps week in February 1998 the network broadcast a thor-
oughly predictable miniseries that focused on the generation gap that
tore apart two families—one white and one black. The network’s gam-
ble paid off with high ratings.
4. Patricia Cohen, “New Slant on the 60s: The Past Made New,” New York
Times, June 13, 1998: A13. Two years before the Times piece, Lingua
Franca published a essay on the reported generational divide among
historians of the sixties. In the essay, historian Thomas Sugrue is
quoted saying that he sees a “bunch of commonalities” between “the
land of Leave It to Beaver” and the sixties. See Rick Perlstein, “Who
Owns the Sixties,” Lingua Franca, May/June 1996: 37. The first scholar
I know of to challenge the idea of fundamental discontinuity between
the fifties and the sixties is Joshua Freeman. Freeman didn’t challenge
the caricatured view of the fifties; rather he argued that historians had
overlooked the significance of conservatism in the sixties. At its peak
in the mid-1960s, the John Birch Society had an estimated 70,000 to
100,000 members—almost exactly, he notes, the estimated member-
ship of SDS at the height of its popularity. See Joshua Freeman,
“Putting Conservatism Back into the 1960s,” in “Teaching the Sixties:
A Symposium,” Radical History Review 44 (1989): 93–107.
5. Ibid., 13.
6. David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s—The Decade that Brought You
Modern Life—For Better or Worse (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
7. Blake and Cmeil are doing an anthology on the seventies.
8. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett, 1993).
9. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communi-
ties Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 51.
10. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of the
Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1983), 240.
2. The Ike Age: Rethinking the 1950s 235
11. Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer . . .: The Death of the Old Left and
the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), xiii.
12. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam,
1987), 110.
13. Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 209.
14. Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-
Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of
North Carolina Press, 1987), 6.
15. Leila Rupp and Verta Rupp, Survival in the Doldrums: The American
Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford, 1987).
16. Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Rad-
ical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993).
17. Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar
America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 4.
18. Ibid., 2.
19. Ibid., 220.
20. Sally Belfrage, Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties (New York:
Harper Collins, 1994), 146.
21. Ibid., 85.
22. Ibid., 119.
23. Ibid., 128.
24. Ibid., 119.
25. Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York: Penguin, 1990), 10.
26. Ibid., 45.
27. Ibid., 65.
28. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
(New York: Basic Books, 1988).
29. Sara Evans, Born for Liberty (New York: Free Press, 1989), 230.
30. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996).
31. George Lipsitz, “Against the Wind,” in Lipsitz, Time Passages (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 123. Lipsitz’s exam-
ples include performers such as Janis Joplin, and while his hypothesis
is arresting, one wonders to what extent white kids were really seduced
by the “democratic and egalitarian propensities” of early rock ’n’ roll
(p. 100). That said, Lipsitz’s incisive work is nonetheless a crucial
236 2. The Ike Age: Rethinking the 1950s
corrective to the pessimistic view of rock ’n’ roll as hopelessly co-

opted or fundamentally conservative.
32. See Gitlin, The Sixties, chapter one.
33. Wini Breines, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the
Fifties (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 23.
34. Henry Louis Gates, Colored People: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 1995),
25.
35. “Telling a Mean Story: Amber Hollibaugh Interviews Dorothy Allison,”
Women’s Review of Books, July 1992: 17.
36. See George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Op-
position (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
38. Quoted in Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1992), 532.
Chapter 3. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”:

Acknowledgments: I presented different versions of this chapter at the Octo-

ber 1990 American Studies convention and the March 1991 conference on
Contemporary Social Movements and Cultural Politics at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. Many people helped me rethink and sharpen the ar-
guments here, including the Socialist Review staff and Barbara Epstein in
particular. Martha Vicinus encouraged me to think bigger. Connie Samaras,
Paula Rabinowitz, Howard Brick, Becky Conekin, Laura Downs, Karen Mer-
rill, and Peg Lourie provided thoughtful criticisms. In the end, of course,
the essay’s shortcomings should be laid at my doorstep. Finally, thanks to
Jello Biafra, whose recent cover of the Animals’ hit put the tune in my mind
and in the title.
1. See Vincent Harding, “It’s Not Enough to Honor King; We Have to
Continue His Human Mission,” Ann Arbor (Michigan) News, January
18, 1988.
2. Citizenship, principled protest, and rock ’n’ roll genius are formulat-
ed as male in JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and The Doors respectively.
In JFK, for instance, citizenship is constructed as masculine both in
3. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” 237
the closing courtroom scene where District Attorney Jim Garrison ad-
dresses his final remarks to his son, and in several scenes between
Garrison and his son (played by Oliver Stone’s son). Garrison’s
daughter is either absent or marginal to these scenes. The major fe-
male character, Garrison’s wife, is depicted as aggressively antipoliti-
cal. Her interest is in her family, certainly not in her husband’s appar-
ently selfless and heroic struggle for truth and justice. In this film the
public and private, formulated as masculine and feminine respective-
ly, are opposed. One wonders if Stone’s fascination with Kennedy and
Garrison might stem in part from the antidomestic masculinity they
seemed to embody.
3. For a discussion of Stone’s engagement with the sixties, see Stephen
Talbot, “’60s Something,” Mother Jones 16, 2 (March–April 1991).
4. See, for example, James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port
Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Tom
Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988); Todd
Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987);
David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1988); Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who
Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1984); Joan and Robert Morrison, From Camelot to Kent State
(New York: Times Books, 1987); Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life
and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985). The
problem is not that most of these writers don’t mention the women’s
liberation movement but that it is peripheral in their accounts. Howev-
er, Zaroulis and Sullivan did manage to write a whole book on the anti-
war movement without once mentioning women’s liberation and its
antiwar efforts. Worst of all is David Caute’s five-hundred-page opus,
which devotes less than five pages to women’s liberation. Miller only
alludes to the coming women’s movement, but this exclusion is some-
what more excusable since his study ends with the Chicago Democratic
Convention in August 1968. However, he, as well as the others listed
above, could have explored the gendered politics of the New Left. The
Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, edited by Judith and
Stewart Albert (New York: Praeger, 1984), includes a section on the
women’s liberation movement. But the authors devote just five pages to
238 3. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”
it in their fifty-five page introductory essay. The ’60s Without Apology,

edited by Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and
Frederic Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
is a collection of essays that, largely through the inclusion of Ellen
Willis’s important essay “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,”
makes some attempt to integrate women’s liberation into its construc-
tions of the sixties. The one book-length study of the sixties that does
integrate the women’s movement (both the liberal branch epitomized
by NOW and the more radical women’s liberation movement) is Stew-
art Burn’s synthetic account, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for
Democracy (Boston: Twayne, 1990).
5. Ellen DuBois, “Women Suffrage and the Left: An International Social-
ist Perspective,” New Left Review 186 (March–April 1991).
6. Both the women’s liberation movement and the New Left were over-
whelmingly white. However, some have argued that by the late sixties
feminist struggles were being waged within, for instance, the black free-
dom movement. According to this argument, historians who have de-
fined the women’s liberation movement as an autonomous movement
primarily concerned with ending male dominance have erased the
emergent black feminist struggle that was embedded within the black
movement (Barbara Omolade, panel remarks at the roundtable discus-
sion of my book Daring to Be Bad, Berkshire conference on the history of
women, June 1990). Tracye Matthews, a graduate student in the history
department at the University of Michigan, is working on women in the
Black Panther Party. Her research should tell us more about this.
7. Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Move-
ment (New York: Morrow, 1987); Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobi-
ography (New York: Random House, 1974); Jane Alpert, Growing Up Un-
derground (New York: Morrow, 1981). One could add to this list Joan
Baez, And a Voice to Sing With (New York: NAL, 1987). But Baez was a
celebrity more outside than inside the Movement.
8. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (New York:
MacMillan, 1972); Cleveland Sellers with Robert Terrell, The River of
No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death
of SNCC (New York: William Morrow, 1973); Anne Moody, Coming of
Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 1971). However, this situation ap-
pears to be changing with the publication of two important Black Pan-
ther memoirs: Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story
(New York: Pantheon, 1992) and 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).
9. Carlos Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York:
Verso, 1989). Of course, Muñoz’s book is problematic in the way it
universalizes male experience. Vicki Ruiz discusses Muñoz’s inatten-
tion to Chicanas in her review of his book in the American Historical Re-
view (December 1991), 1638.
10. Solely in order to minimize confusion about which movement I am re-
ferring to, I will capitalize “Movement” when discussing the overlap-
ping movements of the sixties (black freedom, student, antiwar, and
New Left) and will use the lower-cased “movement” when discussing
the women’s liberation movement.
11. Despite their similar treatments of women’s liberation, these are very
different books. Hayden wrote his book as a memoir; Gitlin acknowl-
edges the autobiographical basis of his book but presents his work as a
more general history of the sixties. Gitlin’s decision to write a history
makes his book more useful than Hayden’s, but more problematic as
well because his experiences and feelings so inform his construction
of the period.
12. Gitlin, The Sixties, 374, 375.
13. Hayden, Reunion, 419.
14. Hayden, like Gitlin, contrasts male and female experience in the
movement at this time, noting that the women’s consciousness-rais-
ing groups were “rather exhilarating, while the men went to morbid
meetings” (Reunion, 421).
16. For a further elaboration of this idea see my book Daring to Be Bad:
Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), esp. 23–49 and 114–37.
17. Winifred Breines, “Whose New Left?” Journal of American History, 75,
22 (September 1988).
18. Richard Flacks has critiqued the idea that the New Left “project” died
in the late sixties. He points to the vitality of grassroots, collective ex-
periments into the seventies. See his useful article “What Happened to
the New Left?” Socialist Review 19, 1 (January–March 1989).
19. This is not to say that for either the New Left or the black freedom
struggle the late sixties marked a time of unequivocal success. Indeed,
many would argue that the organized black movement faltered when
the struggle moved North. And SNCC fell apart long before SDS. But I
would argue that any comprehensive history of the black freedom
struggle would have to grapple with the significance of both black
power and the Black Panther Party, which attempted to address both
class and racial issues.
20. Quoted in Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary
Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroli-
na Press, 1991), 4.
21. In this groundbreaking article Epstein did problematize New Left
men’s masculinity. She maintained that both New Left men and
women were ambivalent about commitment in their personal rela-
tionships. However, she suggested that women’s ambivalence arose
from their dissatisfaction with the quality of their relationships, while
men were more apt to reject or at least feel ambivalent about the very
idea of commitment. Epstein hypothesized that men’s more global re-
jection of commitment might have stemmed from their memories of
the “trapped quality of their fathers’ lives.” Epstein, “Family Politics
and the New Left: Learning from Our Own Experience,” Socialist Re-
view 63–64 (May–August 1982), 153–54. On the relative status of
women in the old left and the new, see Ellen Kay Trimberger, “Women
in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life,”
Feminist Studies 5, 3 (Fall 1979); and Barbara Epstein (going by the
name Easton then), “Women and the Left,” New American Movement
(Summer 1975).
22. See Wini Breines, “The 1950s: Gender and Some Social Science,” Soci-
ological Inquiry 56, 1 (Winter 1986).
23. See Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 37.
24. Mills’s White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1953) opens with a quote from Charles Peguy: “No one
could suspect that times were coming . . . when the man who did not
gamble would lose all the time, even more surely than he who gambled.”
25. Gitlin gets at this point, but without exploring gender, when he re-
marks, “Mills was a hero in student radical circles for his books, of
course, but it was no small part of the persona for which he was cher-
ished that he was a motorcycle-riding, cabin-building Texan, cultivat-
ing the image of a gunslinging homesteader of the old frontier” (The
Sixties, 34).
26. Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer . . .: The Death of the Old Left and
the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 116–23.
28. Hayden, Reunion, 80.
29. Of course, they didn’t identify with male homosexuals, who also occu-
pied the margins of American society. Just as their attitudes toward
women mirrored those of the dominant culture, so did their attitudes
toward homosexuality. Over the course of the period intolerance
seems to have increased as many white new leftists equated militance
with machismo and liberalism with wimpiness. See ex-SDS leader
Gregory Calvert’s review of Wini Breines’s Community and Organiza-
tion in the New Left, 1962–1968 in Telos (Winter 1982–1983).
31. Gitlin, quoted in Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Lib-
eration in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage,
1980), 128.
32. Davis quoted in Evans, Personal Politics, 151.
33. Max quoted in Evans, Personal Politics, 149.
34. Evans notes that by the second year of ERAP many New Left men were
engaged in the business of sexual conquest (Personal Politics, 152).
35. Interestingly, feminist accounts tend to be much less critical of the
black freedom movement. It could be, as Sara Evans suggests, that
white women found the black freedom movement more hospitable
than the New Left, which was such an intellectual proving ground. But
even if this is true, and I am not yet convinced it is (there were, after
all, female intellectuals in the New Left and intellectual discussions in
SNCC), I think feminists’ more charitable account of the black free-
dom movement stems from a feeling of affinity with the philosophy of
black power and a desire to achieve legitimacy within the New Left
through solidarity with that struggle. I have often thought that white
women liberationists’ erroneous attribution of the first memo on sex-
ism in the Movement to an African-American woman, Ruby Doris
Smith Robinson, reflected in part their desire for an easy cross-racial
sisterhood, as well as for political legitimacy, because black women
were at least understood as oppressed, if not usually as women.
36. Morgan, “Rites of Passage,” a 1975 article reprinted in her Going Too
Far (New York: Vintage, 1978), 10.
37. Dworkin, “Why So-Called Radical Men Love and Need Pornography,”
in her Letters from a War Zone (New York: Dutton, 1989), 217. See
Dworkin on the New Left in Right-Wing Women (New York: Perigree,
1983). She contends that before the revival of feminism, New Left men
“fought for and argued for and even organized for and even provided
political and economic resources for abortion rights for women” (95).
They did so because “access to safe abortion made more women will-
ing to be fucked more often by more men” (129). Dworkin claims these
same men deserted abortion rights when feminists redefined the issue
as one of women’s control of their bodies. This is pure fiction: The
New Left never mobilized in support of abortion rights in the days be-
fore feminism. See Suzanne Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
38. This was a slogan of the antidraft movement and it was, ironically,
coined by folksinger and antiwar activist Joan Baez. See her memoir
And a Voice to Sing With, 152.
39. Gitlin, The Sixties, 108. Hayden’s wording differs a bit, but he too notes
this remark (Reunion, 107).
40. Ellen Willis, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,” in Sohnya
Sayres et al., eds., The ’60s Without Apology; Elinor Langer, “Notes for
Next Time: A Memoir of the 1960s,” Working Papers for a New Society 1,
3 (Fall 1973); Kathie Sarachild, “The Civil Rights Movement: Lessons
for Women’s Liberation” (unpublished 1983 speech delivered at the
University of Massachusetts).
41. This genre of rancorous recollections was very much encouraged by the
mid-seventies ascendance of cultural feminism. Briefly, cultural femi-
nism is an antileft strain of feminism that reformulated the central task
of feminism as the construction of a women’s culture where female val-

ues would be nurtured and celebrated. The reasons for cultural femi-
nism’s ascendance within the movement are too complicated to discuss
here, but it was related to the political circumstances of the mid-seven-
ties—the political impasse feminists found themselves in, what Robin
Morgan called the “futilitarian” politics of radical feminism, and, per-
haps most crucially, the movement’s fragmentation along lines of class,
sexual preference, and race. Cultural feminism with its universalizing
discourse of “sisterhood” and its concern with achieving tangible
change in the form of a women’s culture had extraordinary appeal. Those
who tried to raise the issue of the differences between women were de-
nounced as dupes of the male left, which, it was argued, was out to derail
feminism. Cultural feminists had a certain stake in presenting the New
Left as intrinsically and chronically sexist.
42. See Echols, Daring to Be Bad, especially chapter 2.
43. See Echols, Daring to Be Bad, chapters 1–3.
44. The idea that radicalism involved fighting one’s own oppression had
only recently found acceptance in the white left, largely as a result of
the black movement’s expulsion of whites, and French theorists’ in-
vention of the “new working class”—an idea with complicated reper-
cussions in the white left. The early New Left generally cast African
Americans and the poor in the role of revolutionary agents of change.
See Stanley Aronowitz’s immensely instructive article “When the New
Left Was New” in Sayres, et al., The ’60s Without Apology, 35.
45. Mary King, who with Casey Hayden was among the first to challenge
Movement sexism, writes in Freedom Song that both she and Hayden
were drawn to Beauvoir’s writings in part because her female charac-
ters were not defined by men.
46. Rosenfelt and Stacey, “Second Thoughts on the Second Wave,” Feminist
Studies 13, 2 (Summer 1987): 351.
47. Elsa Barkley Brown, “Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for
Women’s History,” History Workshop Journal 31 (Spring 1991).
48. According to Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, resource mobilization theo-
ry, in contrast to earlier scholarship on social change movements,
stresses the importance of resources—expertise, money, publicity, and
the support of influential groups and individuals not involved in the
movement—to a movement’s success. Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor,

Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to
the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Aldon Morris,
The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for
Change (New York: Free Press, 1984).
49. George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Oppo-
sition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988; rev. ed. 1995), 47.
50. See, in particular, Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American
Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1983).
51. See Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History
(New York: Bantam, 1990), 61.
52. For the racial dimension of the attack on rock ’n’ roll see Linda Martin
and Kerry Segrave, Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ’n’ Roll (Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Books, 1988).
53. The term “hillbilly cat” was slang for “white Negro.” See Greil Marcus,
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New York: Dut-
ton, 1982), 181. Marcus’s work was perhaps the first to grasp the full
significance of Elvis’s transgression of America’s racial boundaries.
See also George Lipsitz’s inspired article “Land of a Thousand Dances:
Youth, Minorities and the Rise of Rock and Roll,” in Lary May, ed., Re-
casting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985).
54. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), 197. Andrew Ross
discusses Cleaver’s observation in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular
Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 65–101.
55. Tom Holt, “Notes for a Paper: Reflections on Race-Making and Racist
Practice: Toward a Working Hypothesis” (paper presented to the Com-
mittee for the Study of Social Transformation, University of Michigan,
Spring 1991).
Chapter 4. “Nothing Distant About It”:

Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism
1. See Carol Hanisch, “A Critique of the Miss America Protest,” in Shu-

lamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, eds., Notes from the Second Year:
4. “Nothing Distant About It” 245
Women’s Liberation, (New York: Radical Feminism, 1970), 87, and Judith
Duffet, “Atlantic City Is a Town with Class—They Raise Your Morals
While They Judge Your Ass,” The Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
1, 3 (October 1968). The protesters also criticized the pageant’s narrow
formulation of beauty, especially its racist equation of beauty with white-
ness. They emphasized that in its forty-seven-year history, the pageant
had never crowned a black woman Miss America. That weekend the first
Black Miss America Pageant was held in Atlantic City.
2. See Lindsy Van Gelder, “Bra Burners Plan Protest,” New York Post, Sep-
tember 4, 1968, which appeared three days before the protest. The New
York Times article by Charlotte Curtis quoted Robin Morgan as having
said about the mayor of Atlantic City: “He was worried about our burn-
ing things. He said the boardwalk had already been burned out once
this year. We told him we wouldn’t do anything dangerous—just a sym-
bolic bra-burning.” Curtis, “Miss America Pageant Is Picketed by 100
Women,” New York Times, September 8, 1968.
3. See Jack Gould’s column in the New York Times, September 9, 1968.
4. The Yippies were a small group of leftists who, in contrast to most of
the Left, had enthusiastically embraced the growing counterculture.
For a fascinating account of the 1968 convention, see David Farber,
Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
5. Curtis, “Miss America Pageant.”
6. For the sake of convenience, I will use the term Movement to describe
the overlapping protest movements of the sixties—the black freedom
movement, the student movement, the antiwar movement, and the
more self-consciously political New Left. I will refer to the women’s
liberation movement as the movement; here I use the lower case simply
to avoid confusion.
7. Snitow, interview with author, New York City, June 14, 1984. Here one
can get a sense of the disjuncture in experiences between white and
black women; presumably, black women had not felt the same sense of
distance about their civil rights activism.
8. Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New
York: Random House, 1978).
9. Yet virtually all of the recently published books on the sixties either
slight or ignore the protest. This omission is emblematic of a larger
246 4. “Nothing Distant About It”
problem, the failure of authors to integrate women’s liberation into

their reconstruction of that period. Indeed, most of these books have
replicated the position of women in the larger, male-dominated
protest Movement—that is, the women’s liberation movement is rele-
gated to the margins of the narrative. Such marginalization has been
exacerbated as well by the many feminist recollections of the sixties
that demonize the Movement and present women’s liberation as its
antithesis. Sixties books that textually subordinate the women’s liber-
ation movement include James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From
Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987);
Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988);
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam,
1987); and Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up?: Ameri-
can Protest Against the War in Vietnam. A notable exception is Stewart
Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy (Boston:
Twayne, 1990).
10. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil
Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
11. Sara Evans has argued that in their attempt to combine work inside
and outside the family, educated, middle-class, married white women
of the 1950s were following the path pioneered by black women. See
Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free
Press, 1989), 253–54. As Jacqueline Jones and others have demon-
strated, black women have a “long history of combining paid labor
with domestic obligations.” According to Jones, in 1950 one-third of
all married black women were in the labor force, compared to one-
quarter of all married women in the general population. One study
cited by Jones “concluded that black mothers of school-aged children
were more likely to work than their white counterparts, though part-
time positions in the declining field of domestic service inhibited
growth in their rates of labor force participation.” Jones, Labor of Love,
Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the
Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 269.
12. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in
the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 302.
13. Evans, Born for Liberty, 252.
14. Jane De Hart-Mathews, “The New Feminism and the Dynamics of So-
cial Change,” in Linda Kerber and Jane De Hart-Mathews, eds.,
Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 2d ed., (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 445.
15. I think that this was an experience specific to white women. The
problem of diffidence seems to have been, if not unique to white
women, then especially acute for them. This is not to say that issues of
gender were unimportant to black women activists in the sixties, but
that gender seemed less primary and pressing an issue than race.
However, much more research is needed in this area. It could be that
the black women’s noninvolvement in women’s liberation had as
much, if not more, to do with the movement’s racism than with any
prioritizing of race.
16. Carl Oglesby, “Trapped in a System,” reprinted as “Liberalism and the
Corporate State,” in The New Radicals: A Report with Documents, edited
by Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 266.
For a useful discussion of the New Left’s relationship to liberalism, see
Gitlin, The Sixties, 127–92.
17. See Howard Brick, “Inventing Post-Industrial Society: Liberal and Rad-
ical Social Theory in the 1960s” (paper delivered at the 1990 American
Studies Association Conference). In September 1963 the electoral poli-
tics faction of SDS had even succeeded in getting the group to adopt the
slogan, “Part of the Way with LBJ.” Johnson’s official campaign slogan
was “All the Way with LBJ.” See Gitlin, The Sixties, 180.
18. Gregory Calvert, interview in The Movement 3, 2 (1967): 6.
19. Andrew Kopkind, “Looking Backward: The Sixties and the Move-
ment,” Ramparts 11, 8 (February 1973): 32.
20. That evening seven million people watched Johnson’s speech to Con-
gress announcing voting rights legislation. According to C. T. Vivian,
“a tear ran down” Martin Luther King’s cheek as Johnson finished his
speech. Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years,
1954–1965 (New York: Penguin, 1988), 278.
21. Elinor Langer discusses the ways in which Marcuse’s notion of repres-
sive tolerance was used by the Movement. See her wonderful essay,
“Notes for Next Time,” Working Papers for a New Society 1, 3 (Fall 1973):
48–83.
22. Ellen Kay Trimberger, “Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution
of a Politics of Personal Life,” Feminist Studies 5, 3 (Fall 1979): 442.
23. Potter quoted from Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 196.
24. Miller quoted from Gitlin, The Sixties, 9. Although the broad outlines
of Miller’s argument are correct, some recent scholarship on 1930s
radicalism suggests that it was considerably more varied and less nar-
rowly economistic than has been previously acknowledged. For exam-
ple, recent books by Paula Rabinowitz and Robin Kelley demonstrate
that some radicals in this period understood the salience of such cate-
gories as gender and race. See Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire:
Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1991): Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe:
Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1990).
25. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolu-
tion, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 10–11.
26. Robin Morgan, in Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1970), xxii.
27. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 33. For a very useful history of
women’s rights activism (as opposed to women’s liberation) in the
postwar years, see Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of
Women’s Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988).
28. T. Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Link Books, 1974), 10.
In contrast to other founders of early radical feminist groups, Atkin-
son came to radicalism through her involvement in the New York City
chapter of NOW, admittedly the most radical of all NOW chapters.
Atkinson made this remark in October 1968 after having failed badly
in her attempt to radically democratize the New York chapter of NOW.
Upon losing the vote she immediately resigned her position as the
chapter’s president and went on to establish The Feminists, a radical
feminist group.
29. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 12.
30. Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement
(New York: Random House, 1976), 153. Friedan was antagonistic to
radical feminism from the beginning and rarely missed an opportuni-
ty to denounce the man-hating and sex warfare that she claimed it ad-
vocated. Her declamations against “sexual politics” began at least as
early as January 1969.
31. Due to limitations of space and the focus of this essay, I do not discuss
the many differences among woman’s liberationists, most crucially
the conflicts between “radical feminists” and “politicos” over the re-
lationship between the women’s liberation movement and the larger
Movement and the role of capitalism in maintaining women’s oppres-
sion. This is taken up at length in Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radi-
cal Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1989).
32. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 1. It is the opening line of her book.
33. Adrienne Rich quoted from Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist
Thought (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), 5.
34. Ellen Willis, “Sequel: Letter to a Critic,” in Notes from the Second Year,
edited by Firestone and Koedt, 57.
35. See Ann Snitow, “Gender Diary,” Dissent (Spring 1989): 205–24; Car-
ole Vance, “Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of
Sexuality,” in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?, edited by Anja van
Kooten Niekark and Theo van der Maer (Amsterdam: An Dekken/
Schorer, 1989).
36. Ellen Willis discusses the centrality of abortion to the women’s liber-
ation movement in the foreword to Daring to Be Bad. For the young,
mostly white middle-class women who were attracted to women’s lib-
eration, the issue was forced reproduction. But for women of color, the
issue was as often forced sterilization, and women’s liberationists
would tackle that issue as well.
37. Stanley Aronowitz, “When the New Left Was New,” in The 60s Without
Apology, edited by Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Arono-
witz, and Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), 32.
38. C. Wright Mills, quoted from Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 86.
39. The phrase is from SDS’s founding statement, “The Port Huron State-
ment,” which is reprinted in full as an appendix to Miller’s book,
Democracy Is in the Streets, 333. For instance, Irving Howe, an influen-
tial figure in the old left who attended a couple of SDS meetings, called
them “interminable and structureless sessions.” Howe, “The Decade

That Failed,” New York Times Magazine, 19 September 1982: 78.
40. The statement appeared in a pamphlet produced by the Economic Re-
search and Action Project of SDS. Miller quotes it in Democracy Is in the
Streets, 215.
41. Gregory Calvert, “Participatory Democracy, Collective Leadership, and
Political Responsibility,” New Left Notes 2, 45 (December 18, 1967): 1.
42. See Breines’s summary of prefigurative politics in Wini Breines, Com-
munity and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968 (New York: Praeger,
1982), 1–8.
43. Staughton Lynd, “The Movement: A New Beginning,” Liberation 14, 2
(May 1969).
44. Pat Hansen and Ken McEldowney, “A Statement of Values,” New Left
Notes 1, 42 (November 1966): 5.
45. Tom Hayden, “Democracy Is . . . in the Streets,” Rat 1, 15 (August 23–
September 5, 1968): 5.
46. The Atlanta Project’s position paper has been reprinted as “SNCC
Speaks for Itself,” in The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious
Decade, edited by Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Albert (New York:
Praeger, 1984), 122. However, the title assigned it by the Alberts is
misleading because at the time it was written in the spring of 1966, it
did not reflect majority opinion in SNCC.
47. Rosalind Petchesky, Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality,
and Reproductive Freedom (New York: Longman Press, 1984), 128.
48. Michelle Kort, “Sisterhood Is Profitable,” Mother Jones, July 1983, 44.
49. Amiri Imanu Baraka, “A Black Value System,” The Black Scholar, No-
vember 1969.
50. Jennifer Woodul, “What’s This About Feminist Businesses?” off our
backs (oob) 6, 4 (June 1976): 24–26.
51. Robin Morgan, “Rights of Passage,” Ms., September 1975, 99.
52. For a fascinating case study of this as it relates to women’s music, see Ar-
lene Stein, “Androgyny Goes Pop,” Out/Look 3, 3 (Spring 1991): 26–33.
53. Kort, “Sisterhood Is Profitable,” 44.
54. Stein, “Androgyny Goes Pop,” 30.
55. Adrienne Rich, “Living the Revolution,” Women’s Review of Books 3, 12
(September 1986): 1, 3–4.
56. Quoted from Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1986), 266.
57. “Women’s Liberation Testimony,” oob 1, 5 (May 1970): 7.
58. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 206.
59. Steve Halliwell, “Personal Liberation and Social Change,” in New Left
Notes (quotation); Rennie Davis and Staughton Lynd, “On NCNP,” New
Left Notes 2, 30 (September 4, 1967): 1.
60. See Charlotte Bunch, “The Reform Tool Kit,” Quest 1, 1 (Summer 1974).
61. Frances Chapman, interview with author, New York City, May 30,
1984. Here Chapman was speaking of the radical feminist wing of the
women’s liberation movement, but it applies as well to women’s liber-
ation activists.
62. For more on the prefigurative, personal politics of the sixties, see
Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left; Miller, Democra-
cy Is in the Streets; and Aronowitz, “When the New Left Was New.”
63. Quoted from Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 374.
64. Although individual social critics such as C. Wright Mills influenced the
thinking of new leftists, the noncommunist left of the 1950s and early
1960s remained economistic and anticommunist. Indeed, the fact that
the board of the League for Industrial Democracy—the parent organiza-
tion of SDS in SDS’s early years—ignored the values section of the Port
Huron Statement suggests the disjuncture between the old leftists and
the new. For another view, stressing the continuities between the old left
and the new, see Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer . . .: The Death of
the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
65. See Judith Newton, “Historicisms New and Old: ‘Charles Dickens’
Meets Marxism, Feminism, and West Coast Foucault,” Feminist Studies
16, 3 (Fall 1990): 464. In their assumption that power has a source and
that it emanates from patriarchy, women’s liberationists part compa-
ny with Foucauldian approaches that reject large-scale paradigms of
domination.
66. Carmichael quoted from Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the
Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1981), 282.
67. Firestone and Koedt, “Editorial,” in Notes from the Second Year, edited
by Firestone and Koedt.
68. However, the reclamation of blackness was often articulated in a sexist

fashion, as in Stokely Carmichael’s 1968 declaration, “Every Negro is
a potential black man.” See Carmichael, “A Declaration of War,” in The
New Left: A Documentary History, edited by Teodori Massimo (Indi-
anapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 277.
69. Aronowitz, “When the New Left Was New,” 18.
70. Richard Flacks, “Some Problems, Issues, Proposals,” in The New Rad-
icals, edited by Jacobs and Landau, 168. This was a working paper in-
tended for the June 1965 convention of SDS.
71. Excerpts from Jerry Rubin’s book, Do It, appeared in Rat 2, 26 (January
26–February 9, 1970).
72. “The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles,” in
Notes from the Second Year, edited by Firestone and Koedt, 117.
73. Ehrenreich quoted from Carol Ann Douglas, “Second Sex 30 Years
Later,” oob 9, 11 (December 1979): 26.
74. The term identity politics was, I think, first used by black and Chicana
feminists. See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and
Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 99.
75. Jeffrey Weeks locates the origins of identity politics in the post-1968
political flux. He argues that “identity politics can be seen as part of the
unfinished business of the 1960s, challenging traditionalist hierar-
chies of power and the old, all-encompassing social and political iden-
tities associated, for example, with class and occupation.” Perhaps
Weeks situates this in the post-1968 period because class held greater
significance for many British new leftists than it did for their Ameri-
can counterparts. Weeks, “Sexuality and (Post) Modernity” (unpub-
lished paper).
76. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale Uni-
77. Amy Kesselman, interview with author, New York City, May 2, 1984.
78. “The New York Consciousness Awakening Women’s Liberation Group”
(a handout from the Lake Villa Conference of November 1968).
79. Kathie Sarachild, “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon,” in
Feminist Revolution, edited by Redstockings (New Paltz, N.Y.: Red-
stockings, 1975), 132.
5. The Dworkinization of Catharine MacKinnon 253
80. Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life (New York: Norton, 1985), 101.
81. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, Calif.: Cross-
ing Press, 1982), 226.
82. Lorraine Kenney, “Traveling Theory: The Cultural Politics of Race and
Representation: An Interview with Kobena Mercer,” Afterimage, Sep-
tember 1990, 9.
83. Mercer makes this point as well in Kenney, “Traveling Theory,” 9.
Chapter 5. The Dworkinization of Catharine MacKinnon
1. Catharine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State:

An Agenda for Theory,” Signs 7, 3 (Spring 1982).
2. Ibid., 541.
3. Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
4. Ibid., 113, fn. 1.
5. Martha Weinman Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” New York Times
Magazine, March 10, 1968.
6. Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links, 1974), 103–4.
7. MacKinnon, Only Words, 533.
8. Ibid., 531.
9. Ibid., 316.
10. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and
Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 218.
11. Catharine MacKinnon, “Does Sexuality Have a History?” in Domna
Stanton, ed., Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994).
12. Catharine MacKinnon, “The Male Ideology of Privacy: A Feminist Per-
spective on the Right to Abortion,” in Radical America 17, 4 (July-Au-
gust 1983): 30.
13. “Roundtable: Doubting Thomas,” Tikkun 6, 5 (September-October
1991): 24.
14. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 219.
15. Ibid., 218.
254 5. The Dworkinization of Catharine MacKinnon
16. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Life Without Father: Reconsidering Socialist-

Feminist Theory,” Socialist Review 73 (January-February 1984): 52.
17. MacKinnon, Only Words, 19.
18. Ibid., 21.
19. Ibid., 16. In this passage, MacKinnon’s understanding of male sexual-
ity seems to verge on biologistic. Yet, in contrast to many antiporn
feminists, MacKinnon has always favored social constructionist expla-
nations of gender and sexuality. For example, she has argued against
difference feminism on the grounds that it enshrines as “women’s val-
ues” those “differences that have been created in women under condi-
tions of male domination.” See the Tikkun roundtable, 29.
20. Ibid., 71–72.
21. Ibid., 108.
22. Ibid., 106.
23. Ibid., 107.
Chapter 6. “Totally Ready to Go”:

Shulamith Firestone and The Dialectic of Sex
1. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolu-
tion (New York: Quill, 1993), 45.
2. Unfortunately, it looks as though the book may be out of print, but used
copies can be found.
3. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, 19–20.
4. Ibid., 44, 188.
5. Ibid., 197–8.
6. Ann Snitow, “A Gender Diary,” in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox
Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990), 34.
7. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, 89.
Chapter 7. The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968–1983
Acknowledgments: Many people have made constructive criticisms of this

piece. I would especially like to thank Kate Ellis, Constance Samaras, San-
7. The Taming of the Id 255
dra Silberstein, Bette Skandalis, Ann Snitow, Carole S. Vance, and Ellen
Willis.
1. Bonnie Kreps “Radical Feminism 1,” in Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine,
and Anita Rapone, eds., Radical Feminism (New York: Times Books,
1973), 239; Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire (Boston: Bea-
con, 1979), 114.
2. Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, and Mary Daly are the best known
proponents of this view. The belief that women’s more extensive ex-
perience with nurturance inclines them toward peace and ecology is
widespread among cultural feminists. See off our backs (oob), January
1981, on the Women’s Pentagon Action, and Ynestra King, “Femi-
nism and the Revolt of Nature,” Heresies #13, for an introduction to
ecofeminism. For more sophisticated versions of this argument, see
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Women, War and Feminism,” The Nation,
June 14, 1980, and Sara Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking,” Feminist
Studies 6, 2 (Summer 1980).
3. The reconstituted Redstockings first termed this theoretical tendency
“cultural feminism” in their 1975 publication Feminist Revolution
(reissued by Random House in 1978). Although their critique did
identify some of the problems with cultural feminism, it was serious-
ly marred by paranoia and homophobia. More recently, Ellen Willis
has analyzed cultural feminism especially as it informs the an-
tipornography movement and ecofeminism. See her fine collection
of essays, Beginning to See the Light (New York: Knopf, 1981) and
“Betty Friedan’s ‘Second Stage’: A Step Backward,” The Nation, No-
vember 14, 1981. Major cultural feminist texts include: Adrienne
Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Norton, 1976); Mary Daly, Gyn-Ecol-
ogy (Boston: Beacon, 1978); Raymond, Transsexual Empire; Kathleen
Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1979); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New
York: Harper & Row, 1978). The now defunct Los Angeles-based
magazine Chrysalis also served as a major outlet for cultural feminist
work from its founding by Susan Rennie and Kirsten Grimstad in
1977. The best single radical feminist anthology is Koedt, Levine,
Rapone, eds., Radical Feminism. Also see Shulamith Firestone, The
Dialectic of Sex (New York: Morrow, 1970).
256 7. The Taming of the Id
4. Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of

L’Ecriture Feminine,” Feminist Studies 7, 2 (Summer 1981): 255.
5. Raymond, Transsexual Empire, 114.
6. Anne Koedt, “Lesbianism and Feminism,” in Koedt, Levine, Rapone,
eds., Radical Feminism, 249.
7. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1975), 16; Daly, Gyn-Ecology, 360. For an especially incisive analysis of
Gilder, see Michael Walzer, “Gilderism,” New York Review of Books,
April 2, 1981: 3.
8. Mary Daly, quoted in oob, May 1979; Sally Gearhart, “The Future—If
There Is One—Is Female,” in Pam McAllister, ed., Reweaving the Web
(Philadelphia: New Society, 1982), 271.
9. Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex illustrates the problem with the radical
feminist view of female biology.
10. Jane Alpert, “Mother-Right,” Ms., August 1973; and Rich, Of Woman
Born, 39.
11. Gearhart, in McAllister, ed., Reweaving the Web, 271.
12. Robin Morgan, Going Too Far (New York: Random House, 1978),
164.
13. Daly, Gyn-Ecology, 12.
14. Ibid., 239.
16. Personal communication from Ellen Willis, 1980. For the cultural
feminist view of the left, see Kathy Barry, “Did I Ever Really Have A
Chance? Patriarchal Judgement of Patricia Hearst,” Chrysalis I, 1977;
Morgan, Going Too Far; Rich, Of Woman Born, 285; Alpert, “Mother-
Right,”; Kathleen Barry, “ ‘Sadomasochism’: The New Blacklash to
Feminism,” Trivia, Fall 1982.
17. Barbara Deming, “To Fear Jane Alpert Is to Fear Ourselves,” oob,
May–June 1975.
18. Rennie and Grimstad of Chrysalis were instrumental in establishing
the Circle of Support. It is worth noting that upon Alpert’s surrender
her lawyer stressed her “renunciation of radical activities and her con-
version to the feminist movement.” This prompted oob reporter
Madeleine Janover to ask, “What does this mean for radical femi-
nism?” See oob, December 1974: 5.
19. See Jennifer Woodul, “What’s This About Feminist Businesses?” oob,
June 1976.
20. It was this view which informed the ill-fated and short-lived Feminist
Economic Network (FEN) founded in Detroit in 1975 and dissolved
less than one year later. FEN was the brainchild of the Oakland Femi-
nist Women’s Health Center, the Detroit Feminist Federal Credit
Union, and Diana Press. For detailed accounts see: Belita Cowan and
Cheryl Peck, “The Controversy at FEN,” Her-Self, May 1976; Jackie St.
Joan, “Feminist Economic Seeds Split,” in Big Mama Rag 4, 1; Martha
Shelley, “What is FEN?” circulated by author; Janis Kelly et. al.,
“Money on the Line,” in oob, March 1976; Alice Echols, “Cultural Fem-
inism: Feminist Capitalism and the Anti-Pornography Movement,”
Social Text, 7 (Spring–Summer 1983). See Kathy Barry’s apologia for
FEN in oob, January 1977. This piece was originally submitted to the
Bay Area feminist newspaper Plexus. However, Barry admitted to re-
porter Nancy Stockwell of Plexus that the article was a collaborative ef-
fort involving three of the major principals in FEN—Laura Brown,
Joanne Parrent, and Barbara Hoke. Barry reasoned that an exoneration
of FEN would be better received were it to “come from a community
source” rather than from those responsible for its creation. Plexus re-
fused to publish the article. See Shelley, “What is FEN?”
21. Barry (Brown, Parrent, Hoke),oob January 1977.
22. Barry, “ ‘Sadomasochism’: The New Backlash to Feminism,” Trivia 1
(Fall 1982): 83–84. Incredibly, Barry argues “ ‘lesbian sadomasochism’
is the latest, and so far the most effective leftist strategy for isolating rad-
ical feminism, invalidating it, and attempting to annihilate it” (p. 89).
23. Their faith in women’s moral superiority and commonality of interests
allows them to assume that feminism can be reconciled with capital-
ism, sexual repression, and possibly biological determinism. Cultural
feminism can easily degenerate into the view so cynically articulated
by feminist entrepreneur Laura Brown that “feminism is anything we
say it is.” Quoted in Cowan and Peck, “Controversy at FEN.”
24. Ti-Grace Atkinson, “Lesbianism and Feminism,” Amazon Odyssey
(New York: Links, 1974), 86.
25. Abby Rockefeller, “Sex: The Basis of Sexism,” No More Fun and Games:
A Journal of Female Liberation 6 (May 1973): 31.
26. Anne Koedt, “Lesbianism and Feminism,” in Koedt, Levine, Rapone,

eds., Radical Feminism, 250.
27. See “The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles,”
in ibid., 374.
28. Rita Mae Brown, “The Shape of Things to Come,” Plain Brown Rapper
(Baltimore: Diana, 1976), 114. In a recent interview, Rita Mae Brown
remarked, “Out of that outburst [of anger at homophobia within the
women’s movement] on my part developed the whole ideology of the
lesbian as the ultimate feminist and superior human being which I
would like to say, many years later, is pure horseshit.” Chris Bearchell,
“Interview with Rita Mae Brown,” The Body Politic 95 (July–August
1983): 36.
29. See Brown, ibid.; Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron, eds., Lesbianism
and the Women’s Movement (Baltimore: Diana, 1975); Martha Shelley,
“Notes of a Radical Lesbian,” in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Pow-
erful, (New York: Random House, 1970), 309.
30. Koedt, “Lesbianism and Feminism,” 255.
31. Susan Chute, “Backroom with the Feminist Heroes: Conference for
Women Against Pornography,” Sinister Wisdom, Fall 1980, 2.
33. Karen Lindsey, “Thoughts on Promiscuity,” The Second Wave 1, 3
(1971): 3.
34. Muriel Dimen, “Variety is the Spice of Life,” Heresies #12, (1981), 70.
35. Karen Durbin, “Can a Feminist Love the World’s Greatest Rock and
Roll Band?” Ms., October 1974, 26.
36. Dana Densmore, “On Celibacy,” Leslie Tanner, ed., Voices from Women’s
Liberation (New York: New American Library, 1970), 264. Although
Atkinson’s antisex perspective anticipated and contributed to the devel-
opment of cultural feminism, she should be recognized for her incisive
and prescient analysis of certain aspects of cultural feminism, or what
she termed “female nationalism.” See Judy Antonelli, “Atkinson Re-
Evaluates Feminism,” oob 5, 5 (May–June 1975): 19 for a regrettably hos-
tile account of Atkinson’s gloomy assessment of feminism.
37. Abby Rockefeller, “Sex: The Basis of Sexism,” 25.
38. Roni and Vickie Leonard, “NOW Sexuality Conference,” oob 4, 11 (No-
vember 1974): 3.
39. Deirdre English, Amber Hollibaugh, and Gayle Rubin, “Talking Sex: A
Conversation on Sexuality and Feminism,” Socialist Review 58
(July–August 1981): 44.
40. Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (New York: Perigree, 1983), 237.
41. This slogan originated with Robin Morgan’s 1974 article, “Theory and
Practice: Pornography and Rape,” reprinted in Going Too Far.
42. The earliest discussion of “integrity” is probably in Janice Raymond,
“The Illusion of Androgyny,” Quest 2, 1 (Summer 1975). See Rich’s cri-
tique of “male-identified” dualism in Of Woman Born, 56–83; Susan
Griffin, Pornography and Silence (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). For
a pithy critique of Griffin’s analysis of dualism, see Robert Christgau’s
review in Village Voice, July 15, 1981: 26, 29 ).
43. Julia Penelope, “And Now For the Hard Questions,” Sinister Wisdom
(1980), 103. Cultural feminists use a double standard when analyzing
fantasy—women’s masochistic fantasies reflect their socialization, while
men’s sadistic fantasies reveal their fundamentally murderous nature.
Interestingly, in Homosexuality in Perspective (Boston: Little, Brown,
1979) Masters and Johnson report that in their heterosexual sample
men’s second most frequently reported fantasy entailed forced sex.
However, they reported fantasies of being forced to have sex slightly
more frequently than fantasies of forcing another. See pp. 188–89.
44. Morgan, Going Too Far, 171.
45. Ibid., 181.
46. For the radical feminist view, see Firestone, Dialectic of Sex.
47. Andrea Dworkin, “Why So-Called Radical Men Love and Need
Pornography,” in Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on
Pornography (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 152.
48. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
in Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person, eds., Women: Sex
and Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 73. Rich
praises Catharine MacKinnon, author of Sexual Harassment of Working
Women, for criticizing Susan Brownmiller’s “unexamined premise that
‘rape is violence, intercourse is sexuality,”’ or, in other words, for dif-
ferentiating between rape and intercourse.
49. The movement luminaries interviewed in the antipornography docu-
mentary Not A Love Story avoided their usual polemics against male
sexuality and heterosexuality and instead displayed a newly discov-

ered concern for the ways in which pornography victimizes men. Of
course, a humanist facade is not only more compatible with the
movement’s stated aim of eliminating pornography, but more likely
to elicit support and sympathetic coverage. For a review of Not a Love
Story, see B. Ruby Rich, “Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World,” Village
Voice, July 30, 1982.
50. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Stimp-
son and Person, Women: Sex and Sexuality, 81.
51. Ethel Person, “Sexuality as the Mainstay of Identity: Psychoanalytic
Perspectives,” in ibid., 57.
52. See Larry Bush and Richard Goldstein, “The Anti-Gay Backlash,” Vil-
lage Voice, April 8, 1981; Deirdre English, “The War Against Choice,”
Mother Jones, February/March 1981.
53. Ann Snitow, “The Front-Line: Notes on Sex in Novels by Women,
1969–1979,” in Stimpson and Person, Women: Sex and Sexuality, 165.
54. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in ibid.,
79.
55. Raymond, Transsexual Empire, 104.
56. Raymond worries that male-to-female lesbian-feminist transsexuals
might be used to transform “lesbian-feminist space [into a] harem.”
See ibid., 104–13. Daly is quoted on p. 104.
57. Dworkin, “Pornography and Grief,” in Lederer, Take Back the Night,
289; Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in
Stimpson and Person, Women: Sex and Sexuality, 80; Jill Clark, “Inter-
view with Robin Morgan,” Gay Community News, January 20, 1979.
58. Heresies #12 (1981) published both the NOW resolution and two sepa-
rate letters of protest, pp. 92–93; Scott Tucker, “The Counter-Revolu-
tion,” Gay Community News, February 21, 1981.
59. Some gay men, like lesbian cultural feminists, are committed to max-
imizing gender differences—a course likely to have calamitous conse-
quences for the already fractured “gay movement.” For an introduc-
tion to this masculinist ethic, see John Preston, “Goodbye Sally
Gearhart: Gay Men and Feminists Have Reached a Fork in the Road,”
Christopher Street 59; Eric Rofes, “The Revolution of the Clones / Talk-
ing with John Preston,” Gay Community News, March 27, 1982: 8.

61. Daly, Gyn-Ecology, 373.
62. Quoted in Richard Goldstein, “I Left My Scalp in San Francisco,” Vil-
lage Voice, October 1, 1979.
64. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, 113.
65. Quoted in Goldstein, “I Left My Scalp in San Francisco.”
66. Brown, Plain Brown Rapper, 112.
67. Barry, “ ‘Sadomasochism’: The New Backlash to Feminism,” 82; Rich,
“Compulsory Heterosexuality,” 72; Penelope, “And Now for the Hard
Questions,” 103; Daly, Gyn-Ecology, 20.
69. See Ellen DuBois and Linda Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battle-
field: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual
Thought,” in Carole Vamce, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female
Sexuality, 31–49.
70. Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, 228.
71. Ibid., 211.
72. Person, in Stimpson and Person, Women: Sex and Sexuality, 50–51;
Irene Diamond, “Pornography and Repression,” in Lederer, Take Back
the Night, 202; Florence Rush, The Best Kept Secret (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1980), 190–91.
73. See Willis, Beginning to See the Light for a good analysis of the relation-
ship between feminism and individualism.
75. Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, 227.
76. Diana Russell and Laura Lederer, “Questions We Get Asked Most
Often,” in Lederer, Take Back the Night, 29.
77. Willis, Beginning to See the Light, 225.
78. Judith Bat-Ada, “Playboy Isn’t Playing,” in Lederer, Take Back the
Night, 132.
79. The parallel development within the left is the pro-family ideology pro-
moted by cultural conservatives like Christopher Lasch, Michael Lerner,
and Tom Hayden. See Michael Lerner, “Recapturing the Family Issue,”
The Nation, February 2, 1982, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s response,

“Family Feud on the Left,” The Nation, March 13, 1982.
80. Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, 103. For an elaboration of this point, see
Paula Webster, “Pornography and Pleasure,” Heresies #12 (1981): 50.
81. See Carole S. Vance, conference concept paper, “Towards a Politics of
Sexuality,” in Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger, 443–46.
82. For a discussion of cultural feminism’s idealization of the mother-
daughter bond, see Echols, “Cultural Feminism: Feminist Capitalism
and the Anti-Pornography Movement,” 39. For another view of the
mother-daughter problematic, see Susan Contratto and Nancy Chodor-
ow, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,” in Barrie Thorne, ed., Rethink-
ing the Family: Some Feminist Questions (New York: Longman, 1982).
83. Some s/m lesbian-feminists suggest that s/m sex is more egalitarian
and less solipsistic than “vanilla” sex. Like lesbian chauvinism of the
early 1970s, s/m chauvinism is an understandable response to the
near-unanimous vilification of s/m within the feminist community.
Fortunately, it is hard to imagine that s/m will be venerated as the fem-
inist sexuality, because, unlike lesbianism, it so fundamentally con-
tradicts movement orthodoxy. However, the distinction between per-
sonal preference and prescriptivism is often confounded in a
movement such as ours which requires that we justify our sexual im-
pulses in political terms and which encourages us to generalize and
theorize from our own experience. For example, at a recent Boston
forum on s/m a woman in the audience—not a practitioner of s/m—
suggested that “s/m may be the only way to lessen power imbalances
that are rooted in our culture.” (reporter’s italics). Jil Clark, “Lesbian
S/M Forum,” Gay Community News 10, 50 (July 9, 1983): 6. By contrast,
Pat Califia maintains that s/m is neither intrinsically feminist nor an-
tifeminist. See Pat Califia, “The Advisor,” Advocate 375 (October 13,
1983): 38.
Chapter 8. Queer Like Us?
Acknowledgments: Lois Banner, Jennifer Terry, Alice Wexler, and Gilda

Zwerman helped me sharpen the arguments in this chapter.
8. Queer Like Us? 263
1. Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the
U.S.A. (New York: Avon Books, 1976).
2. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Re-
lations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, 1
(Autumn 1975).
3. Ibid., 8. Christine Stansell, “Revisiting the Angel in the House: Revi-
sions of Victorian Womanhood,” New England Quarterly (September
1987): 471.
4. Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World”: 9.
5. My first substantial paper as a graduate student was a critique of
Smith-Rosenberg’s essay. My adviser encouraged me to submit it to
The Radical History Review. After months of silence—my essay provoked
intense debate, I was told—the RHR collective offered to publish an
“extremely condensed” and substantially revised version, a “research
note.” I had known that my essay suffered from a reliance on second-
ary sources and was highly speculative, so I wasn’t surprised by the re-
sponse. However, I was taken aback by the readers’ reports, one of
which claimed that my paper read as though it were written by some-
one who was both “antifeminist” and “antilesbian.” As corrective
medicine, the reviewer prescribed Blanche Wiesen Cook’s “Female
Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal East-
man, and Emma Goldman” in Chrysalis 3 (Autumn 1977). I did revise
the paper, but I did not resubmit it to RHR. It was published subse-
quently as “The Demise of Female Intimacy in the Twentieth Century,”
Michigan Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies 6 (Fall 1978).
6. Blanche Wiesen Cook, “The Historical Denial of Lesbianism,” Radical
History Review 20 (Spring/Summer 1979): 64.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,”
in Catherine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person, eds., Women: Sex
and Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 89.
10. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: Morrow,
1981), 20. Faderman did modify her argument somewhat in Odd Girls
and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century Ameri-
ca (New York: Penguin, 1992).
264 8. Queer Like Us?
11. Leila Rupp paved the way for a more nuanced approach in the early
’80s with her gentle rebuke to Blanche Cook and Adrienne Rich. Rupp
warned historians against using expansive definitions of lesbianism
that deny the reality of women’s historical experience. Rupp argued
that historians should “distinguish between women who identify as
lesbians and/or are part of a lesbian culture, where one exists, and a
broader category of women-committed women who would not identi-
fy as lesbians but whose primary commitment, in emotional and prac-
tical terms, was to other women.” See Leila Rupp, “ ‘Imagine My Sur-
prise’: Women’s Relationships in Mid-Twentieth Century America,”
Frontiers, A Journal of Women’s Studies 5, 3 (Fall 1980). It was reprinted
in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., eds.,
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York:
New American Library, 1989), where the quote mentioned above ap-
pears on p. 408.
12. Another reason that feminists were better able to address butch-
femme was that at about the same time feminists of color such as Audre
Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and Baraba Smith were challenging feminists
to deal with differences between women, rather than generalize from
the experiences of white middle-class women.
13. Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy, “Oral History and the Study of
Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940–1960,”
Feminist Studies 12, 1 (Spring 1986).
14. Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the
New Woman,” Signs 9, 4 (Summer 1984).
15. Jennifer Terry, “Theorizing Deviant Historiography,” differences 3
(Summer 1991).
16. George Chauncey, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Ho-
mosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the
World War I Era,” Journal of Social History 19 (1985).
17. Lisa Duggan, “The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology,
and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Signs 18, 4
(Summer 1991): 793.
18. George Chauncey, Gay New York (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Eliza-
beth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold
(New York: Routledge, 1993).
19. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, rev. ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966), 65.
20. Ibid., 44 and 34.
21. I characterize it as largely defunct because Tomás Almaguer has shown
that the active-passive model still exists among Chicano men. See
“Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior,”
in differences 3 (Summer 1991).
22. In making the case for tolerance, Chauncey does rely quite a bit on the
testimony of middle-class men who fetishized working-class men,
possibly not the most reliable sources.
23. See Lizabeth Cohen’s review of Chauncey’s book in The Journal of Amer-
ican History 83, 2 (September 1997): 685–87.
24. Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 23.
25. Ibid., 370. For another discussion of butch, see Leslie Feinberg’s novel
Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebird Press, 1993).
26. Ibid., 322.
27. Ibid., 226.
28. Kennedy and Davis do make an effort to compare the experiences of
lesbians and gay men and conclude that lesbians, like gay men, were
“explicitly interested in exploring sexuality.” However, gay men “have
institutionalized enjoying sex for sex’s sake, while lesbians have not.”
They also note that gay men have a “highly developed tradition of
camp, whereas lesbians don’t.” See Kennedy and Davis, 382–83.
29. Chauncey, Gay New York, 27.
30. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” 80.
31. Martin Duberman, et. al., Hidden from History, 6. In the eighties, gay
and lesbian historians found themselves embroiled in what rapidly be-
came a very tiresome debate about the relative merits of social con-
struction theory, which holds that sexuality is historically and socially
constructed, versus essentialism, which views sexuality as an intrinsic
and essential quality that exists outside of culture and history. What
made this a peculiar debate was that virtually all gay and lesbian histo-
rians identified themselves as social constructionists. Even Yale histo-
rian John Boswell, whose 1980 book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality was criticized as essentialist, identified with social con-
structionism. It was the larger culture (and often our students) that
266 8. Queer Like Us?
defended essentialism. With the ascension inside the academy of queer

theory, which proposes a radically denaturalized vision of sexuality, this
debate has largely fizzled out, though many gay students and activists
continue to favor essentialist, even biological, understandings of ho-
mosexuality. This anthology features Boswell’s essentialist argument
and David Halperin’s critique.
32. Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993) and Esther
Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island (Boston: Beacon, 1993).
33. Duberman, Stonewall, xv.
34. Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island, 85.
35. Esther Newton explores the way that drag queens bear the stigmata of
homosexuality in Mother Camp: Female Impersonation in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 103–5.
36. Chauncey, Gay New York, 17.
37. See, for example, Alice Echols, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times
of Janis Joplin (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999). I also presented a
paper, “Thousands of Cats and Hundreds of Chicks,” about Joplin’s sex-
uality at a Fall 1995 conference sponsored by CLAGS, the Center for Les-
bian and Gay Studies at City University of New York. It appears in this
volume as “Thousands of Guys and a Few Hundred Women.”
38. For an interesting critique of lesbian-feminism’s requirement of ex-
clusive lesbianism, see Jan Clausen, “My Interesting Condition,”
Out/Look, Winter 1990: 13.
39. At the time that these books appeared, queer theory was still pretty
much confined to literature departments. However, the dissatisfaction
with identity politics and cautious middle-of-the-road activism that
fueled queer theory and its activist cousin, the flash-in-the-pan Queer
Nation, were widely felt, I think, especially inside the academy.
40. Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social The-
ory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi.
41. Foucault quoted in Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman (New York:
Knopf, 1999), 250. For other examples of queer theory’s anti-identi-
tarian stance see Warner, ibid., and Caleb Crain, “Pleasure Princi-
ples,” in Lingua Franca, October 1997: 31.
42. Kennedy has criticized their approach in her insightful essay, “Telling
Tales: Oral History and the Construction of Pre-Stonewall Lesbian

Identity,” in Radical History Review 62 (Spring 1995): 74.
43. Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, xxv.
44. Warner, quoted in Crain, “Pleasure Principles,” 31.
45. Chauncey, Gay New York, 6–7.
46. Donna Penn raises this concern, too, in “Queer: Theorizing Politics
and History,” in Radical History Review 62 (Spring 1995): 33.
47. For tomboyish girls—and, of course, not all tomboys grow up to be les-
bians—alienation may occur later in adolescence.
48. In certain ways, Gayle Rubin’s wonderfully provocative essay “Think-
ing Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” prefig-
ured queer theory’s privileging of perversion. Rubin’s essay appeared
in Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: The Politics of Sexuality
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267–319.
49. Martha Umphrey, “The Trouble with Harry Thaw,” in Radical History
Review 62 (Spring 1995): 19.
50. A number of lesbian scholars have argued that queer is as universaliz-
ing a discourse as the older formulation “lesbian and gay.” See Sue-
Ellen Case, “The Apparitional Community,” in American Quarterly 48,
1 (March 1996): 163; Teresa de Lauretis, “Film and the Invisible,” in
Bad-Object Choices, eds., How Do I Look: Queer Film and Video (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1991); Donna Penn, “Queer: Theorizing Politics and Histo-
ry,” 39.
51. Umphrey, “The Trouble with Harry Thaw,” 20.
52. Penn raises this as well in “Queer: Theorizing Politics and History.”
53. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Ho-
mosexual Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 2. This
is admittedly an older book, but she has yet to focus on lesbian desire.
54. Teresa de Lauretis, “Film and the Invisible,” 273.
55. Penn, “Queer: Theorizing Politics and History,” 39. At a CLAGS Con-
ference in 1995 Kennedy was criticized for having not considered that
the butches in Boots of Leather were really transgendered. Being butch
apparently wasn’t queer enough for her critic.
56. Crain, “Pleasure Principles,” 28.
57. My account is drawn from ibid., 33.
268 9. “Thousands of Men and a Few Hundred Women”
Chapter 9. “Thousands of Men and a Few Hundred Women”:

Janis Joplin, Sexual Ambiguity, and Bohemia
1. Author’s interview with Richard Hundgen.

2. Ellis Amburn, Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin (New
York: Warner, 1992), 104.
3. John Gill, Queer Noises (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1995), 96.
4. Peggy Caserta (as told to Dan Knapp), Going Down with Janis (Secaucus:
Lyle Stuart, 1973), 7.
5. Jill Johnston’s 1971 Village Voice column was reprinted in her wonder-
fully mischievous brief for lesbianism, Lesbian Nation (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1973), 231. Her claim was then reported in “Ran-
dom Notes,” Rolling Stone’s gossip column, on January 20, 1972. How-
ever, Johnston’s allegation received very little play in the press.
6. Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday
Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 142.
7. The only time I ever saw Joplin make a move that might be interpreted
as less than heterosexual was during a concert in Germany when she
brought a woman up onstage to dance. However, she immediately
brought other audience members up onstage, too. See the video Janis:
The Way She Was.
8. “Melissa Etheridge on Janis Joplin,” Rolling Stone, February 23, 1995: 50.
9. Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (Random House, 1984),
82; interview with Peter Berg.
10. Author’s interview with Dave Getz, June 23, 1995.
11. Author’s interview with Peggy Caserta, February 13, 1997.
12. Author’s interview with Diane Di Prima.
13. Maria Damon, “Victors of Catastrophe: Beat Occlusions,” in Lisa
Phillips, ed., Beat Culture and the New America, 1950–1965 (New York:
Whitney Museum of Art, 1996), 144.
14. Carl Solomon, Emergency Messages: An Autobiographical Miscellany
(New York: Paragon, 1989), 13.
15. I use the terms Beat and beatnik somewhat interchangeably because
Joplin and her friends appear not to have made a distinction.
16. Author’s interview with Linda Gottfried Waldron.
10. Gender Disobedience, Academia, and Popular Culture 269
17. Myra Friedman, Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin (New York:
Harmony, 1992), xxiv.
18. Edmund White, “Gender Uncertainties,” New Yorker, July 17, 1995, 81.
One might also explore the effects of gay liberation on transvestites
like Sylvia Rivera, who was one of the drag queens who started the
ruckus at the Stonewall Inn that June night in 1969. To gay activists,
Rivera and other drag queens often seemed a throwback to an earlier
model of male homosexuality, one rooted in effeminacy, and as a re-
sult Rivera and other transvestites were sometimes shunned by the
fledgling gay movement.
19. Gore Vidal put forward this view, and though he wasn’t a Beat, his po-
sition shares quite a lot with the beatnik skepticism of sexual labeling.
See Henry Abelove, “The Queering of Lesbian/Gay History,” in Radical
History Review 62 (Spring 1995): 56, fn. 11.
20. Foucault quoted in Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman (New York:
Knopf, 1999), 250.
21. Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993), 209.
Chapter 10. Gender Disobedience, Academia, and Popular Culture
1. Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chica-

go: University of Chicago Press, rev. ed., 1979).
2. Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
(Boston: Beacon, 1979).
3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
4. “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler,” Artforum, Sep-
tember 1992: 84.
5. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Mani-
festo,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New
York: Routledge, 1991).
6. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us
7. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
270 10. Gender Disobedience, Academia, and Popular Culture
8. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and
Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1996).
Chapter 11. “Shaky Ground”: Popular Music in the Disco Years
1. Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside
Rock and Out (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 287.
2. Along with the originator of funk, James Brown, Sly moved R&B into
funk, the percussive, polyrhythmic dance music that ’80s and ’90s
rappers have so relentlessly plundered. But Brown went deep—“knee
deep”—into the groove, while Sly’s funk was more hook-driven and
experimental, with its psychedelic guitars and freaky horns.
3. Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone
History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1986), 427. In
writing about Sly Stone, I have also relied upon Greil Marcus’s won-
derful essay about his music in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock
’n’ Roll Music, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1982).
4. Sixties soul artists generally didn’t record songs that were openly
political.
5. Ward, Stokes, Tucker, eds., Rock of Ages, 534. Shortly before he died,
Hendrix, who in 1967 had bragged that he wasn’t “going in for any of
this ‘Midnight Hour’ kick,” was even toying with the idea of forming an
R&B band. Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebeek, Jimi Hendrix Electric
Gypsy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 156. Hendrix’s interest in
forming an R&B group can be found in Charles Shaar Murray’s bril-
liant book, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-War Rock ’n’ Roll
Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 180.
6. According to Steve Perry, from 1955 to 1958 “the roster of rock ’n’ rol-
l’ers was more racially equal than at any time before or since. See
Perry, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough: The Politics of Crossover,” in
Simon Frith, ed., Facing the Music (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 67.
George Lipsitz contends that the percentage of best-selling records by
black artists increased from 3 in 1954 to 29 in 1957. After 1959, the
percentage by black artists declined every year. See Lipsitz, Time Pas-
sages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 126.
11. “Shaky Ground”: Popular Music in the Disco Years 271
7. One Stones fan, angry about rock journalist Ken Tucker’s criticisms of
the crowd, wrote the critic an anonymous letter that read, “Us W.A.S.P.
rock ’n’ rollers pay to see white performers and not niggers, faggots, or
tawdry critics like yourself.” Quoted in Greil Marcus, Ranters and
Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992 (New York: Doubleday),
206. In hiring black musicians to open for them the Stones were pay-
ing homage to the R&B and blues musicians who had so inspired them.
8. My account of the disco wars draws on a number of articles. I am espe-
cially indebted to two brilliant essays: Andrew Kopkind, “The Dialec-
tics of Disco,” Village Voice, August 12, 1979 and Tom Smucker,
“Disco,” in Jim Miller, ed., The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock &
Roll, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1980). Also very useful are:
Walter Hughes, “Feeling Mighty Real: Disco as Discourse and Disci-
pline,” Village Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly, Summer 1993; Frank Rose,
“Discophobia,” Village Voice, November 12, 1979; Jefferson Morley,
“Three Cheers for Disco,” The Reader: Los Angeles’s Free Weekly, Febru-
ary 3, 1989; Peter Braunstein, “The Last Days of Gay Disco,” Village
Voice, June 30, 1998; Carolyn Krasnow, “Fear and Loathing in the ’70s:
Race, Sexuality, and Disco” in Stanford Humanities Review 3, 2: 37–45.
9. Smucker, “Disco,” 427. Jackson’s Thriller was released in 1983.
10. Mikal Gilmore, “Disco!” Rolling Stone, April 19, 1979: 54.
11. Stephen Holden, “The Evolution of a Dance Craze,” Rolling Stone, April
19, 1979: 30.
12. Andrew Kopkind, “Dialectics of Disco,” 11.
13. Jon Pareles, “Disco Lives! Actually It Never Died, New York Times, Oc-
tober 17, 1999, section 2: 40.
14. Bob Cannon, “Disco’s ‘Fever’ Pitch,” Entertainment Weekly, January 22,
1993.
15. The Rolling Stone Interview with Madonna, Rolling Stone, September 10,
1987: 88.
16. John Payne, “His Way,” L.A. Weekly, August 8–14, 1997: 44.
17. Jon Pareles, “Disco Lives!” 1. Pareles wrote this piece because the
staged version of Saturday Night Fever was opening on Broadway.
18. Rob Kenner, “That Ol’ Black Magic,” Vibe, September 1999: 188.
19. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Plume,
1989), 181.
272 11. “Shaky Ground”: Popular Music in the Disco Years
20. Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (New York: Knopf,
1981), 277.
21. Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New York:
Doubleday, 1990), 270.
22. Morley, “Three Cheers for Disco,” 7.
23. Peter Herbst, quoted in Draper, 270.
24. Some writers differentiate between R&B and soul music, but I use the
terms interchangeably in this essay.
25. The Editors of Rolling Stone, The Rolling Stone Interviews: The 1980s
(New York: St. Martin’s Press/Rolling Stone Press, 1989), 348.
26. Ward, Stokes, Tucker, eds., Rock of Ages, 378.
27. KMPX included in its public service announcements meetings of
SNCC and the Black Panthers’ breakfast program. White support for
the Panthers was such that even Bill Graham reluctantly held benefits
for them.
28. It’s no accident that the ballrooms featured the same musicians that
free-form radio played. Graham’s booking practices at the Fillmore
had been the model for KMPX’s eclectic programming.
29. Ward, Stokes, Tucker, eds., Rock of Ages, 484.
30. Marcus, Ranters and Crowd Pleasers, 202.
31. As Ed Ward writes, “Funkadelic finds itself a rock band with no rock
audience to speak of.” See Ward, “The U.S. Funk Mob: ‘We Can Be As
Bad As We Need To Be,”’ Village Voice, July 25, 1977: 39.
32. Letter to the Editor, Rolling Stone, May 9, 1974: 16.
33. There are important exceptions, including Dave Marsh, Robert
Christgau, Greil Marcus, Tom Smucker, Russell Gersten, and Vince
Aletti.
34. David Morse quoted in Iian Chambers, Urban Rhythms (New York:
Macmillan, 1985), 117.
35. Gleason quoted in Murray, Crosstown Traffic, 79.
36. Jon Landau, who went on to become Bruce Springsteen’s manager, was
by far the worst in this regard.
37. Although Motown was taken to task for sounding too “white” and Stax
celebrated for its “blackness,” the musicians, songwriters, and pro-
ducers at Motown were almost uniformly black whereas the creative
nucleus at Stax was integrated. Steve Perry writes perceptively about
the racial politics of popular music—and Stax’s interracialism—in his

“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in Frith, Facing the Music, 51–87.
38. Simon Frith, Sound Effects (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 22; Jon Lan-
dau, “Rock 1970,” Rolling Stone, December 2, 1970: 43.
39. “Soul ’67,” Rolling Stone, February 24, 1968: 18. Writers like Landau
didn’t share Ralph Gleason’s enthusiasm for acid rock, but they often
did share his disdain for black music’s commercialism.
40. Jon Landau, “Otis Redding,” in Miller, ed., Rolling Stone Illustrated His-
tory, 212.
41. Ibid., 210.
42. Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro” is reprinted in Judith
and Stewart Albert, The Sixties Papers (New York: Praeger, 1984), 97.
43. Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and
Blues (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 524. See also James Miller, Flow-
ers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock ’n’ Roll, 1947–1977 (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1999), 47–52. Miller calls Atlantic Records’ R&B “white
Negro music,” though he doesn’t use the term disparagingly. Howev-
er, it’s not clear from Miller’s narrative if Ahmet Ertegun, the founder
of the company, was consciously gearing the music toward young
white listeners. On the one hand, Miller quotes Ertegun claiming that
he tried to get Ruth Brown, who went on to become Atlantic’s first big
star, to sing more like a “real” Negro and less like Doris Day. On the
other hand, he also says that he and his partners “discovered that
white kids started buying these records because the real blues were
too hard for them to swallow.” What is clear from Ertegun’s com-
ments is that Atlantic was aware of its white fans and that the compa-
ny did walk a tightrope of sorts as it tried to appeal to both black and
white listeners.
44. Gerald Early, “One Nation Under a Groove,” The New Republic, July 15
& 22, 1991: 38. However, as Suzanne Smith points out, Gordy also es-
tablished a distinct label, the Soul label, for music like Junior Walker
and the All-Stars’ “Shotgun,” that was more geared to the black mar-
ket. As Smith points out, “Shotgun’s” success on the pop charts re-
vealed how “dubious these racial music categories were.” See Smith,
Dancing in the Street (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1999), 164.
45. Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music, Rhythm and Blues and the Southern
Dream of Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 250.
46. There were, however, some people at Stax, like producer/songwriter
Isaac Hayes, who thought Motown’s music was whiter. Hayes objected
to Motown’s enormous whomp of a backbeat, which had once prompt-
ed Beatle John Lennon to ask one of the Four Tops if their drummer
beat on a “bloody tree” to “get that backbeat.” Hayes said, “Now it was
the standard joke with blacks, that whites could not, cannot clap on a
backbeat. You know—ain’t got the rhythm? What Motown did was very
smart. They beat the kids over the head with it. That wasn’t soulful to
us down at Stax, but baby, it sold.” Gerri Hirshey, Nowhere to Run: The
Story of Soul Music (New York: Penguin, 1985), 184.
47. Ertegun quoted in Miller, ed., Rolling Stone Illustrated History, 50, 52.
48. Ed Ward, “In the Beginning of the Blues, There Was a Violin,” New York
Times, October 17, 1999, section 2: 37.
49. Stanley Crouch, Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979–1989,
(New York: Oxford, 1990), 101.
50. Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 69.
51. Ibid, 68.
52. Sam Cooke’s record producers tell of the time they asked Cooke to do
another take of a song in which he’d sung “ax” rather than “ask.” On
the fourth take he complied, but not before he laughed and said, “Hey,
man, you’re taking my heritage.” Hirshey, Nowhere to Run, 111.
53. For example, when the Supremes met the Beatles, the Brits iced them
out. Mary Wilson says they were dismayed because they’d shown up
“perfectly poised,” in “elegant” day dresses and fur coats. Years later,
George Harrison revealed to Wilson the reason for their coolness. “We
expected soulful, hip girls. We couldn’t believe that three black girls
from Detroit could be that square!” Ibid., 178.
54. See Murray, Crosstown Traffic, 90. Wonder’s version of the Dylan song
went to #1 on the R&B charts and #9 on the pop charts.
55. Hirshey, Nowhere to Run, 171.
56. Ellison quoted in Perry, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” 86. Elli-
son was criticizing black nationalists, and in particular Leroi Jones,
but the same assumptions held sway among any number of white
rock critics.
57. Mary Wilson recalls the time one British critic scolded the Supremes,
“Get back to church, baby!”: Mary Wilson, Dreamgirl: My Life as a
Supreme (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 210–11. Martha Reeves
of Martha and the Vandellas was an exception; she sang in her father’s
church, but she also trained in classical music at her high school. The
Detroit schools had an exceptionally strong music program. Gerald
Early, “One Nation Under a Groove,” 37.
58. Wilson, Dreamgirl, 211.
59. Ibid., 210–11.
60. O’Connell Driscoll, “Stevie Wonder in New York,” in Jann Wenner,
ed., Twenty Years of Rolling Stone (New York: Straight Arrow Press,
1987), 254.
61. Hirshey, Nowhere to Run, 334. Redding and Cropper knew what they
needed to make a pop hit because the song that had helped Otis first
cross over, 1965’s “Loving You Too Long,” was, in Cropper’s words,
“real slick R and B . . . real crafted stuff.”
62. Russell Gersten, “Aretha Franklin,” in Miller, ed, Rolling Stone Illus-
trated History, 252. For those unfamiliar with Aretha Franklin’s career,
it’s important to know that her first label, Columbia Records, tried to
make her over into a pop singer. Although she had several Top 10 R&B
hits in the early sixties, her career didn’t take off until she switched la-
bels and began recording straight-ahead soul music on Atlantic
Records.
63. Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music, 338. White R&B songwriter Jerry Leiber
was blunter, blaming Aretha’s new sound on her desire for “upward
mobility.”
64. Beginning in 1968, Gamble and Huff jump-started Butler’s sagging
career with a series of Top 20 hits and the aptly titled album, The Ice
Man Cometh.
65. MFSB was an acronym for Mother, Father, Sister, Brother.
66. Like Motown’s Berry Gordy, Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff had no
qualms about making crossover music, but Gamble was a black na-
tionalist who tried to put a “message in the music,” specifically that
African Americans needed to build strong male-headed families.
However, he never let his family values get in the way of selling
records, preferring for the most part to limit his preaching to his
albums’ liner notes. “Assimilation worked for a black nationalist cap-

italist who could write hit songs,” was critic Nelson George’s cynical
observation: Death of Rhythm and Blues, 146.
67. Hirshey, Nowhere to Run, 349–50.
68. Ibid., 351–52. Sam Cooke was the logical referent, a man who made
music that crossed the color line, but who was no Uncle Tom. At a time
when even most white musicians were routinely exploited by lousy
contracts, Cooke was fully in control of his business, owning his own
record label, music publishing, and management companies.
69. Monk quoted in Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Cul-
ture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 68.
70. “Lady Soul: Singing It Like It Is,” Time, June 28, 1968: 62.
71. Frith, Sound Effects, 21.
72. Ibid., 22.
73. For some musicians the ability to make music that spoke to conditions
in the black community or reflected racial pride was, of course, exhil-
arating. You can hear it in Curtis Mayfield’s “We’re a Winner,” James
Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Marvin Gaye’s
“What’s Going On,” Aretha’s cover of Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted
and Black,” and Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City,” to name a few.
74. R&B musicians had not been expected to be “political” in the halcyon
years of the civil rights movement. Indeed, the strong-arming of artists
was a sign of the black movement’s growing wobbliness, not its strength.
By the time the Black Panthers started leaning on Jimi Hendrix and Sly
Stone, most of the group’s leaders were either in jail or in exile.
75. Hirshey, Nowhere to Run, 191.
76. This was an especially vexed issue at Motown, which sold 70 percent of
its records to whites. The company established a label that released
some of Martin Luther King’s speeches, but avoided cutting message
music until 1970. However, Gordy and some of his stars appeared at
Dr. King’s funeral in 1968. And by mid-1969, the Supremes were be-
ginning to “go black power,” as Rolling Stone put it, by wearing
“African” clothes. See Rolling Stone, June 4, 1969: 25. The report was
sarcastic, calling the move “very daring stuff.”
77. Brown’s difficulty in penetrating the pop charts also reflected the in-
creasingly funky groove music he was making.
78. Marcus, Mystery Train, 83. Both Greil Marcus’s essay on Sly Stone in Mys-
tery Train and Dave Marsh’s article on early ’70s R&B in his collected es-
says, Fortunate Son (New York: Random House, 1985) are excellent.
79. The Family Stone included two of Sly’s siblings.
80. See Timothy Crouse, “The Struggle for Sly’s Soul at the Garden,” in
Wenner, ed., Twenty Years of Rolling Stone (New York: Straight Arrow
Publishers, 1987), 135–44. The interview was originally published in
November 1971.
81. “Slit-eyed pessimism” was critic Ken Tucker’s assessment. “Despair-
ing, courageous, and very hard to take,” wrote Robert Christgau. Greil
Marcus found its unflinching exploration of “the state of the nation,
Sly’s career, his audience, black music, black politics and a white
world” groundbreaking.
82. Critic Vince Aletti attributed Riot’s commercial success to its dance
tracks, and Marsh agreed.
83. Marsh, Fortunate Son, 271.
84. Ward, Stokes and Tucker, Rock of Ages, 498. The writer is Tucker.
85. Sly’s voice would be endlessly imitated by funk groups from the Gap
Band to the Ohio Players.
86. In 1979, Epic Records disco-ized Sly’s hits on the album Ten Years Too
Soon, but it fell flat.
87. Marcus, Mystery Train, 95.
88. There was no comparable movement in white rock or pop, although
there were isolated songs such as Don McLean’s 1972 hit, “American
Pie,” which was ostensibly about the deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie
Valens, the Big Bopper, and Janis Joplin but nonetheless captured
some of the wistfulness felt by whites who’d had higher hopes for rock
’n’ roll, the Movement, or themselves.
90. Sly was rumored to have had an affair with Doris Day; he was friends
with her son, Terry Melcher.
93. Ibid., 107.
94. Ibid., 101.
95. In 1978, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, the cofounders of Chic,
wrote and produced the hit song “We Are Family” for Sister Sledge. He
has spoken of this work as political in the documentary Public Enemy.
Rodgers met Nelson Mandela years later at a dinner honoring the
freed South African leader. According to Rodgers, Mandela told him
that hearing “We Are Family,” which apparently slipped past South
African radio censors and was audible on a nearby radio, had helped
him endure prison.
96. George, Death of Rhythm and Blues, 153.
97. Kopkind, “Dialectics of Disco,” 13.
98. Paul Gilroy quoted in Robin Kelley, “Black Working-Class Opposition
in the Jim Crow South,” The Journal of American History 80, 1 (June
1993): 85.
99. Ironically, it was an electronics genius who worked for that bastion of
family values Disneyland who put together the Ice Palace by taking “old
stereo systems, and light bulbs and Christmas lights” so that for the
first time the “music went with the lights.” See Esther Newton, Cherry
Grove, Fire Island (Boston: Beacon, 1993), 244.
100. Kopkind, “Dialectics of Disco,” 11.
101. Richard Goldstein, Big Science,” in Larry Gross and James D. Woods,
eds., The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society,
and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 414.
102. Quoted in Kopkind, “Dialectics of Disco,” 13. Women were not alto-
gether outside of rock culture, of course. Lots of women loved rock ’n’
roll, but they tended to be less narrow-minded than men, for whom
rock could become a kind of fetish. Some women might also have been
more open to disco because it encouraged greater contact with one’s
dance partner than did dancing to rock, which, as this speaker sug-
gests, could become an exercise in solipsism.
103. Chambers, Urban Rhythms, 188.
104. Houston Baker, “Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy for the 1990s,”
in Andrew Ross and Constance Penley, eds., Technoculture (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 198.
105. Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (New York: Bantam, 1979), 32.
106. Aletti quoted by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster, who wrote the
liner notes for the Larry Levan Live at the Paradise Garage CD, released
2000.
107. Hughes, “Feeling Mighty Real.”

108. Ibid.
109. When Nile Rodgers of the disco group Chic pointed out that rock ’n’
roll had once been trashed as “repetitious,” his words fell on deaf ears.
Rodgers quoted in Rolling Stone, April 19, 1979: 32.
110. Smucker, “Disco,” 433. Smucker was actually much more openmind-
ed about disco than this one comment would suggest.
111. Walter Hughes makes this point, too.
112. Frank Owen, “Spirituality Having Flown,” review of Larry Levan Live at
the Paradise Garage, Village Voice, September 12, 2000: 137.
113. Hughes, “Feeling Mighty Real,” 10.
114. Certainly lots of heterosexual men embraced the beat, but enough
didn’t to make Sandra Bernhard’s evocation of a straight man’s ini-
tial reaction to a gay disco especially resonant. See her film Without
You, I’m Nothing.
115. Ward, Stokes, and Tucker, eds., Rock of Ages, 524.
116. White quoted in Vince Aletti, “Lost in Music: The Dancing Machine:
An Oral History,” Village Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly, Summer 1993: 15.
117. Smucker, “Disco,” 430.
118. Some rock critics looked to punk, which had appealed to the working
class in Britain, as a subversive force in much the way that they be-
lieved sixties rock had been.
119. “A Lasting Impression: The Rolling Stone Interview with Curtis May-
field,” Rolling Stone, October 28, 1993: 66.
120. George, Death of Rhythm and Blues. In contrast to most rock critics, he
liked early disco but believed that a whole host of people conspired to
“defunk disco.”
121. Ibid., 157–59.
122. He argued that they tried to “remove the modifying adjective ‘black’
from their lives.” The music George deemed authentically “black”
seemed to be music he happened to like. Thus, Michael Jackson’s
“Rock with You” has soul, according to the critic, but Stephanie Mills’
“What You Gonna Do with My Loving?” is nothing more than “corpo-
rate black pop.”
123. As evidence, George says that only one song that topped the black
charts in 1983, Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money,”
even made it into the pop Top 10. See ibid., 181. Yet according to the
Billboard charts, a number of songs that topped the black charts, in-
cluding Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night
Long (All Night),” and Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” headed up the
pop charts too.
124. Ward, Stokes, Tucker, eds., Rock of Ages, 594. This was originally re-
ported in the December 1983 article in Rolling Stone. Prince’s straight-
ahead rock ’n’ roll hit of 1982, “Little Red Corvette,” was among the
first videos by a black performer to land in MTV’s rotation. By the time
“Little Red Corvette” was released on 1999, his fifth album, Prince was
already a well established hitmaker. Jon Pareles and Patricia Ro-
manowski, eds., The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (New York:
Rolling Stone Press, 1983), 444.
125. MTV’s definition of rock was expansive enough to include white mid-
dle-aged comic Rodney Dangerfield’s “Rappin’ Rodney,” but too nar-
row to accommodate Prince, or virtually any other black artist. Dance
music wasn’t regularly programmed on the station until American
bands like the Talking Heads and British bands, in particular, started
experimenting with it. Just as ’50s and early ’60s blues and R&B ac-
quired cachet in the States through British Invasion bands like the
Rolling Stones, ’80s dance music gained legitimacy in the U.S. by way
of Britain, with groups like the Eurythmics and Culture Club with Boy
George. There were three ways to guarantee inclusion in MTV’s rota-
tion: “no black faces, pretty women, and athletic guitar solos”: Ed
Steinberg of the video club Rock America, quoted in Linda Martin &
Kerry Segrave Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ’n’ Roll (Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Books, 1988), 279.
126. Dave Marsh, “Freddie’s Dead and Diana Ross Is Singing the Blues,” in
Marsh, Fortunate Son, 191. Ken Tucker says that Columbia was “ru-
mored” to have threatened MTV. See Ward, Stokes, Tucker, eds., Rock
of Ages, 595.
127. Prince was not only racially and sexually ambiguous, he was also un-
abashedly sexual, in contrast to Jackson. “No black performer since
Little Richard,” wrote George, “had toyed with the heterosexual sensi-
bilities of black America so brazenly” (174). George found Michael
Jackson’s case especially unsettling because this “alarmingly unblack,
unmasculine figure” was the most popular black man in America. Nor
was Jackson the only black star whose masculinity seemed somehow
thwarted or underdeveloped. Other than Bill Cosby, white America’s
favorite black male TV stars in the ’80s were Emmanuel Lewis and
Gary Coleman, who were literally growth-impaired. Clearly Michael
Jackson’s appeal to white Americans had something to do with the fact
that for a time he seemed sexually innocent, even neutered.
128. George, Death of Rhythm and Blues, 192. See Ernest Hardy, “Home of
the Brave: Alone Together with P. M. Dawn,” L.A. Weekly, December
25–31, 1998: 35, for an analysis of the way that rapper Prince Be’s
blackness and sexuality were called into question by other rappers.
129. Interestingly, Houston Baker cites Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady” as
one of the first singles to be marketed for a white audience. Yet the
musicians backing Taylor on “Disco Lady” were none other than the
super funky players in Funkadelic. See Dave Marsh, ed., For the Record:
George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History (New York: Avon, 1998), 93.
130. Baker, “Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy,” 198.
131. Dave Marsh makes a different, but related, argument in “Freddie’s
Dead and Diana Ross Is Singing the Blues.” Marsh argues that disco’s
privileging of the beat over the performer “played into the hands of
white racists (both those who hated the stuff, and used it to bait, and
those who liked it, and used it to avoid a more direct confrontation)”:
Fortunate Son, 268.
132. There were female rappers from the beginning, as Tricia Rose has
pointed out. However, the men were the first to record and were rap’s
first stars.
133. Touré, “In the End, Black Men Must Lead,” New York Times, August 22,
1999, section 2: 1.
134. Also important was rapper Afrika Bambaataa who formed the Zulu Na-
tion to encourage inner-city kids to compete with each other as rap-
pers and dancers, in an effort to stop gang violence.
135. Vince Aletti, “Inside the Flavor Factory,” Village Voice Rock & Roll Quar-
terly, Winter 1992: 18.
136. Run-D.M.C. not only had a penchant for including the word “rock” in
lots of their songs’ titles, they even featured a searing rock guitar on
one cut from their first album.
137. On “It’s Like That” Run raps of feeling so disillusioned, “I just go

through life with my glasses blurred.” “Wake Up” depicts a utopian
world of love and brotherhood that’s just a dream people need to rouse
themselves from, a point underscored by the sound of someone snor-
ing in the background.
138. The album was mistaken by most listeners for a frat party album rather
than a send-up of one.
139. Nancy Hass, “A TV Generation Is Seeing Beyond the Color Line,” New
York Times, February 22, 1998: 38.
140. Jon Pareles, “Still Tough, Still Authentic. Still Relevant?” New York
Times, November 14, 1999, arts section: 14. NWA’s 1989 release,
Straight Outta Compton, turned gangsta rap into a “full-fledged genre
and growth industry.” MTV’s aggressive hyping of Snoop’s 1993 re-
lease, Doggystyle, helped rap edge out rock ’n’ roll in the hearts and
minds of teenaged white boys.
141. Hass, “A TV Generation Is Seeing Beyond the Color Line,” 38.
142. Neill Strauss, “A Land With Rhythm and Beats for All,” The New York
Times, August 22, 1999, arts section: 28. Tricia Rose argues, however,
that it’s possible that the percentage of white rap consumers is not as
great as generally thought because the prevalence of bootleg street
tapes and CDs in poor communities make it difficult to gauge sales to
urban black and Latino buyers. See Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and
Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Uni-
143. Strauss, ibid., 28. As Strauss and others point out, for children of white
boomers listening to rap also has been a way to rebel against their par-
ents. Rap’s popularity with young people has opened up a generation
gap among both blacks and whites. Many older black Americans now
tune into oldies R&B radio. Alienated from rap and heavy metal, some
graying white boomers have found themselves turning the dial to
oldies stations, too, or to country radio. In fact, one country music in-
sider, Charlie Monk, claims that “the best thing that ever happened to
country was rap.” See Peter Applebome, “Country Graybeards Get the
Boot,” New York Times, August 21, 1994, section 2: 28. Of course, oth-
ers have continued listening to classic rock or metal. Among some
hardcore rockers, like Metallica’s James Hetfield, there’s a racist edge
to this shunning of rap. Asked his opinion of hip-hop music, he said,

“Rap is just to me very annoying. . . . Just the fact that it’s extra-black,
too—blacks, y’know, we want everything, we deserve it, give it to us.”
“Rockbeat,” Village Voice, June 2, 1992.
144. Anthony DeCurtis, “Their Way,” Rolling Stone, May 19, 1994: 97.
145. Performance artist Danny Hoch has given us delicious send-ups of this
world, most recently in the film Whiteboys. Norman Mailer found
Hoch’s whiteboys so uncannily like his ’50s hipsters that he assumed
the actor had read his 1957 essay. Yet Hoch’s research took him no fur-
ther than his own multiethnic Queens neighborhood.
146. Baby Gerry of Full Force Crew, which puts together much of the music
in the world of teeny-bop pop. Kenner, “That Ol’ Black Magic,” 188.
147. N. R. Kleinfield, “Guarding the Borders of the Hip-Hop Nation,” New
York Times, July 6, 2000.
148. Danny Hoch, “Straining to Live Black,” New York Times, October 10,
1999, section 2: 18.
149. Calvin Sims, “Gangster Rappers: The Lives, The Lyrics,” New York
Times, November 28, 1993, section 4: 3.
150. Quoted in ibid. Stanley Crouch is far more critical. “They are a bunch
of opportunists who are appealing to an appetite that America has for
vulgarity, violence and anarchy inside Afro America,” he says.
151. For example, Chuck D. of Public Enemy grew up in a middle-class
home in Long Island. See Rick Marin, “The Ice Man Cometh,” Spin,
May 1994: 62.
152. Richard Wright, review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watch-
ing God, New Masses, October 5, 1937.
153. Hughes quoted in Smith, Dancing in the Street, 172.
154. Robert Christgau, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music,
1967–1973 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), 31. At first, critic Richard Gold-
stein felt much the same way as Christgau about Hendrix. According to
Charles Murray, some older black Americans considered Hendrix “a
stoned clown acting like a nigger for the amusement of white folks.”
See Murray, Crosstown Traffic, 82.
155. Ibid., 84.
156. James Baldwin, “A Fly in the Buttermilk,” in Nobody Knows My Name
(New York: Dell, 1961), 172.
157. By the early nineties, rap had developed several different strands.
Hammer and Sir-Mix-A-Lot made infectious pop rap and Levert put
out R&B-flavored hip-hop. There was the edgy black nationalist rap of
Public Enemy and KRS-One. De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, Arrested
Development, Digable Planet, and PM-Dawn were frequently lumped
together as “alternative rap.” Different though the “alt-rappers” were,
they did share a desire to move beyond the macho posturing of much
rap. And once Roxanne Shanté demanded equal time, women rappers,
most notably Salt-n-Pepa, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, and TLC, chal-
lenged the hip-hop patriarchy. See Rose, Black Noise, 154.
158. Recent CDs by TLC and Janet Jackson come to mind.
159. Here Rose is criticizing Nelson George, who has argued that rap’s
commercialization will bring about its “cultural emasculation.”
George has warned that rap’s commercialization could cause its “cul-
tural emasculation.” As Tricia Rose points out, “For George, corporate
meddling not only dilutes cultural forms, but also it reduces strapping,
testosterone-packed men into women!” See Rose, Black Noise, 152.
160. Kevin Powell, “Enemy Territory,” Vibe 2, 7 (September 1994): 64.
161. Neill Strauss makes a similar argument in “A Land With Rhythm and
Beats for All.”
Chapter 12. White Faces, Black Masks
1. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
2. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music
(New York: Dutton, rev. ed., 1982), 181, 198.
3. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Plume,
1988), 63.
5. George Lipsitz, Time Passages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1990), 120–30.
6. Johnny Otis, Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue
(Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993).
Index
Abortion. See Reproductive rights domination, 101; pornography

Acid (LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide), as symptom of patriarchal
19, 20, 23, 27, 34, 43 conditioning, 152; pornography
ACT (American Conservatory Theater), victimizing men, 259–60n49; rift
29 between academics and activists,
African Americans. See Blacks/African 4–6; women as sexually alienated,
Americans victims, and moral guardians, 126–
Afrika Bambaataa, 281n134 27; women’s sexual inhibition as
Aletti, Vince, 183 confirmation of superiority, 110
Allison, Dorothy, 59 Antiwar movement: demonstration
Alpert, Jane, 111 at Oakland induction center, 36;
Altamont rock festival, 44, 46 ignored in some accounts of
Amburn, Ellis, 146 women’s liberation movement,
Andrew, Sam, 38 237–38n4
The Animals, 25 Aronowitz, Stanley, 90–91
Anna Halprin Dance Company, 28 Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 83, 99, 114–15,
Anticommunism, 50, 54, 55 118, 248n28, 258n36
Antipornography movement: attempts Atlanta Project, 86
to silence critics, 113–14; Catharine Atlantic Records, 273n43
MacKinnon’s views, 97–102; as Avalon Ballroom, 27, 37
conflict within women’s movement,
100; cultural feminists as activists “Badness” versus good-girlism, 7, 8,
in, 123; demonization of maleness 103, 105, 107, 108, 183
and heterosexuality, 123; dichoto- Baker, Houston, 67, 183
mizing male versus female sexuality, Baker, Russell, 55
4–5; fantasy as dangerous, 119; Ballard, Florence, 171
insistence on incorrigibility of male Bangs, Lester, 163
sexuality, 126; as juggernaut, 95; Baraka, Amiri (formerly LeRoi Jones),
mobilizing feminists, 116; pornog- 87
raphy as responsible for male Barbiturates, 42
286 Index
Barnard College Scholar and Feminist person reaping profits from

Conference (1982), 5–6, 152–53 appropriation of “black” music, 73
Barry, Kathy, 114, 124–25, 126 Black feminist movement, 238n6
Barthol, Bruce, 44 Black freedom movement, 90, 240n19,
Bean, Babe, 151 241–42n35
Beastie Boys, 189–91 Black Panther Party, 33, 50, 179,
Beatles, 24 228n73, 276n74
Beats: as all doom and gloom, 30; and Black radicals: for agonized white
beatniks, 224n8, 268n15; as cachet, males, freedom movement seen as
18; challenging domesticated disintegration of “beloved
masculinity of postwar period, 72; community,” 65–66; blackness
compared to hippies, 30–31, articulated with sexist overtones,
32–34; elevation of sexual fluidity 252n68; claiming African
and indeterminacy, 148, 149; as Americans constitute “internal
explicitly masculine, 34; rebellion colony,” 84; excluding whites, 70;
fizzling by 1960, 18; social mixing few autobiographies from, 63;
of lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, philosophical breakthroughs by,
139 undergirding women’s liberation
Bee Gees, 161 movement, 71–72; rejecting
Belfrage, Sally, 56–57 liberalism, 80
The Bell Curve, 154 Blacks/African Americans: acceptance
Belmont, Bill, 26–27, 38 contingent on matching racial
Benjamin, Harry, 154 profile, 10; debating issue of self-
Benson, George, 186 representation, 191; disco music
Berdache, 151 favored by, 179, 181–83; musical
Berg, Peter, 29, 37 artists breaking constraints of soul,
Berkeley Free Speech Movement 172–75; musical artists’ variegated
(1964), 27, 49, 155 influences, 169–71; musical
Bernhard, Sandra, 107 restlessness, 205; not central to
Bikers and Hell’s Angels, 36, 43–44, new hippie bohemia, 33; problem
46, 50 of negotiating race, 191–92; as
Billingslea, Joe, 175 products of musically borderless
Biological determinism, 111–12 integration, 202, 203; racial
Birth control pill. See Reproductive crossings seen as self-loathing and
rights selling out, 197; rejection of older
Blackface minstrelsy: by black musical genres and styles, 205;
musicians, 196–97; as racial signifying hipness for Beats, 33;
domination, contempt, interest, viewed as invested with greater
envy, 195–96; rock ‘n’ roll music authenticity and soulfulness, 10;
as, 193; substituting racial hostility whites’ fascination with blackness,
for class struggle, 196; as white 10, 67–68, 187, 190, 193–97,
Index 287
244n53; women admired as self- Carmichael, Stokely, 90, 93

reliant and assertive, 70, 108; Caserta, Peggy, 19, 146, 148
women in black feminist move- Cassady, Carolyn, 228n77
ment, 238n6; women’s non- Castell, Luria, 28, 36, 229–30n95
involvement in women’s liberation, Catero, Fred, 206
247n15; women with domestic Chapman, Frances, 89
obligations also in labor force, Chappell, Kim, 145–46, 150
246n11 Chauncey, George, 133, 134, 135, 136,
Blake, Casey, 52 138
The Blast, 28 Cherry Grove, Fire Island, 138
Bloomfield, Michael, 200 Child-care centers, 88
Blues: crossover artists, 200–201; as Christgau, Robert, 40, 214
product of musical miscegenation, Chrysalis magazine, 255n3
170; revival in 1960s, 200 Chuck D., 192
Bluesbreakers, 25, 26 Civil rights movement: beginnings in
Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of fifties, 52; impact of television, 59;
Gender Ambiguity, 153 leaders supporting Johnson, 81;
Bogart, Neil, 186 unintentionally ignited by Cold
Bonding, female, 116 War’s strategic rhetoric of
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 136 democracy, 72
Bornstein, Kate, 154, 155 Clapton, Eric, 24
Bowie, David, 146 Clinton, Bill, 51
Bra-burning by militant feminists, 76 Clinton, George, 186
Breines, Wini, 59, 66, 85 Cmeil, Ken, 52
Brightman, Carol, 47, 50 Cohen, Bob, 35
British Invasion in music, 24 Cold War, 58, 59–60, 72
Brontë,” Charlotte, 132 Colette, 132
Brown, Bob, 43 The Committee, 29
Brown, James, 175, 186, 206 Consciousness raising and sisterhood,
Brown, Rita Mae, 115, 123 92
Brownmiller, Susan, 96, 111, 116 Conservatism: resurgence of, 81;
“Bummer,” 23 vilification of sixties by, 61
Butch-femme roles, 129–30, 132, 136– Containment as political strategy,
38, 139, 153 57–58
Butler, Jerry, 159, 173 Contraception. See Reproductive
Butler, Judith, 153 rights
Butterfield Blues Band, 26, 200 Cook, Blanche Wiesen, 131
Byrds, the, 25 Cooke, Sam, 174, 274n52, 276n68
Cops/police, 45, 46
Calvert, Gregory, 80, 85 Cornbury, Edward Hyde, Viscount, 151
Capitalism, 84, 113 Cott, Nancy, 92
288 Index
Counterculture: absence of histories of, movement activists, 123; compar-

15, 17, 18; affluence, materialism ison to radical feminism, 7, 112–14;
contributing to shift to, 20–21; demonization of male and female
commercialization of, 47–48; as sexuality, 110; double standard
commitment to high-risk living, 9, regarding fantasy, 259n43; faith in
48–50; contemporary political women’s moral superiority, 257n23;
movements overshadowing, 17; as female counterculture, 110–11,
delving into market and “lifestyle,” 114; feminist capitalism, 113,
47; dropping out from sense of 257n2; as fusion of daughters with
spiritual, emotional emptiness, mothers, 127; on gay male sub-
22–23; drugs cutting big swath culture, 121; hegemony within
through, 42–43, 49–50; Haight- feminist movement, 110; inclined
Ashbury as epicenter, 17; as toward peace, antipornography
homophobic, 33–34; laissez-faire movement, and ecofeminism,
libertarianism of, 48, 50; liber- 255n2, 255n3; lesbianism, 122–23;
tinism and hedonism, 9, 48, 59; origins of term, 95–96; reconsid-
reactions to anticommunism, 50; eration of, 7–8, 95–96; separation
relation to New Left, 9, 27–28, 46, from “male” values, 116; sexuality
48–49; stereotyped as goofy as dangerous, 118–21; sexual
optimism, 18; Sunset Strip prescriptivism and orthodoxy, 123;
(Hollywood) protest (1966), on violence against women, 125;
227n65; tied to conventional woman-bonding, 116. See also
mainstream America, 50. See also Feminism; Radical feminism
Haight-Ashbury; Hippies Cultural radicalism, 48
Country music, 282n143 Cultural studies, 157, 194
Coyote, Peter, 21, 22, 34, 43, 47, 223n2
Crain, Caleb, 143 Daly, Mary, 111, 112–13, 121
Credit unions for women, 87 Damon, Maria, 148
Crocker, Frankie, 186 Dances, parties, party circuit: Avalon
Cropper, Steve, 172 and Fillmore Ballrooms, 27, 37;
Crosby, David, 25, 31, 209, 213 avant-garde experiments, 28–29;
Cross-dressing, drag, and electric ballrooms, 166; by Family
transvestitism, 152–53, 269n18 Dog, 35–36; gaining legitimacy by
Crouch, Stanley, 170, 283n150 way of Britain, 280n125; as multi-
Crudup, Arthur, 167 media events featuring poets,
Cultural feminism: against apathy, theater troupes, light show artists,
assimilation, and individualism, 28; racially mixed in fifties L.A.,
124; against sexual liberation as 194; replaced by stadium rock, 47,
antifeminist, 123–24, 125; as 166, 179; in San Francisco, 27; as
antileft strain celebrating female white and heterosexual, 179. See
values, 242n41; as antipornography also Disco music
Index 289
Daring to Be Bad, 7, 15 of black creators, 188; as possibility

Davis, Francis, 170 for connectedness, 182–83; R&B
Davis, Madeline, 133, 136–38 (rhythm and blues, or soul music)
Davis, Rennie, 68 moving closer to, 174, 177, 178–79;
Davis, Ronny, 44 racial antagonism in, 11; as
Day-Glo colors, 19, 33 reincarnation as “dance music,”
The Death of Rhythm and Blues, 193 162; singers dispensed with, 180;
de Beauvoir, Simone, 71 working-class origins, 180–81
De Hart-Mathews, Jane, 79 Discophobia: among R&B fans, 186;
D’Emilio, John, 53, 134 among rock critics and fans, 184,
Democratic National Convention 185–86; bleaching and feminizing
(1968), protest by women’s R&B, 187; collision of rock and
liberation movement, 76–77 R&B, 11; elevation of divas,
Densmore, Dana, 118 symbolic castration of black man,
The Dialectic of Sex, 96, 103–8 187; ending white America’s
Dick, Philip K., 50 fascination with blackness, 187–88;
Didion, Joan, 17, 34 heterosexual men’s anxiety about
Diggers, 21, 22–23, 30, 33, 34, 224n14, women’s sexuality, 185; homo-
224–25n16 phobia and racism at root of, 162–
Dimen, Muriel, 117 63; men’s uneasiness, 184–85; in
Di Prima, Diane, 32–33, 148 MTV broadcasts, 186–87; shallow,
Disco music: apparent racelessness, narcissistic, 182; supremacy of beat
164–65, 192; as “beloved commu- over guitar and singers, 184; tarring
nity,” 183–84; with black origins, of R&B with brush of burst bubble,
yet viewed as “white,” 11; cele- 186–87
brating bad black girl, 183; Domesticity, ideology of, 79
commercial dance clubs appearing Draft, fear of, 31–32
soon after Stonewall, 182; crashing Drag, cross-dressing, and
by 1979, 161; deejays create transvestitism, 152–53, 269n18
seamless sound, 182; deejays’ Dress, styles of, 20, 21–22
networks for publicity and record Drop-out philosophy, 22–23, 46
distribution, 180; discotheques Drugs: cutting big swath through
and, 179; door policies, 183–84; counterculture, 49–50; destabil-
early tunes, 180; as escape from izing Haight-Ashbury scene, 42–
the real, 188; favored by blacks, 43; as excess and exhilaration of
latinos, and gays, 179, 181–83; life on the edge, 50; “head” versus
foregrounding of female desire, “body” drugs, 231n125; LSD
185; as formulaic but not mono- (lysergic acid diethylamide) “acid,”
lithic, 180; as origin of today’s 19, 20, 23, 27, 34, 43; marijuana,
popular music, 52; as popular and 42; and SDSers, 233n160; speed, 42
despised, 160–61; popular in spite Duberman, Martin, 138–39
290 Index
Du Bois, Ellen, 63 bad, 3; desire for connectedness

Du Bois Club, The, 28 and intimacy versus desire for
Duggan, Lisa, 133 freedom and autonomy, 221;
Durbin, Karen, 117 feeding feelings of sexual shame, 5;
Dworkin, Andrea: bashing of, 6; in fifties, 56; granting too much
critical of biological determinism power to gender, 220; heterosexual,
of gender, 112; on male sexuality, as suspect, 116; as humorless and
120; on New Left men, 69; as uptight, 6; lesbianism and, 114;
proverbial wild-eyed radical, 97, link with sexual freedom, 95;
98; on sex oppression of women, marriage augmenting men,
119 diminishing women, 57; notoriety
“The Dworkinization of Catharine in, 6; as postfeminism, 99; racism
MacKinnon,” 91–102 and “snow blindness” of, 108; rifts
Dylan, Bob, 24–27, 73, 198, 212, 218–19 in, 54–56; sexual repression versus
sexual liberation, 99; threatened by
Egan, Jennifer,, 223n2 antipornography movement, 95; as
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 91, 100 unstylish, humorless, and prudish,
Ellison, Ralph, 171 96; women as closer to nature, 110.
Elshtain, Jean, 106 See also Cultural feminism; Radical
English, Deirdre, 118 feminism
Epstein, Barbara, 66 Feminist Economic Network (FEN),
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 54, 88 257n3
ERAP (Economic Research and Action Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 26
Projects) (SDS), 68 Fifties, The: beginnings of civil rights
Ertegun, Ahmet, 169, 273n43 movement and antimaterialism, 52;
Essentialism, 265–66n31 connection to sixties, 52; kids
Etheridge, Melissa, 147 rejecting segregated suburbs, 194
Evans, Sara, 68, 69, 77, 78 Fillmore Auditorium, 27
Everly Brothers, 25 Fillmore district, 37, 42
Firestone, Shulamith: on child-care
Faderman, Lillian, 132, 143 centers, 88; The Dialectic of Sex and,
Family: feminism as reaction to 96, 103–8; on Marxist interpre-
subjugation in, 104; as final outpost tation of women’s oppression, 82;
of compassion and nurturance, 106; on need for sexual revolution, 113,
radical feminism’s attacks on, 117; on NOW’s political stance, 83;
105–6; as source of women’s on value of women’s movement, 90
oppression, 119; versus individ- First Amendment and antipornography
ualism, 124; women’s subordination legislation, 101–2
in as “tapeworm of exploitation,” 83 Flack, Roberta, 172
Family Dog, 35, 229–30n95 Flacks, Richard, 91
Feminism: boundary between good and Flower children, 30. See also Hippies
Index 291
Folk music, 19, 23–24 feminism, 106–7; shifts in radical

Fonda, Peter, 213 feminist thinking on, 109–10;
Food co-ops, 48 supplanted by sexuality as
Foucault, Michel, 90, 134, 140, 150 domination/subordination for
Franklin, Aretha, 172, 275n62 radical feminists, 99; women’s
Freed, Alan, 58 liberation movement achieving
Freedom Schools, 86 fundamental realignment of roles,
Freeman, Jo, 103 94
Freeman, Joshua, 234n4 “Gender Disobedience, Academia, and
Free Speech Movement (UC-Berkeley Popular Culture,” 96
1964), 27, 49, 155 Gender Outlaw, 154
Freud, Sigmund, 104, 108 George, Nelson, 186, 187, 193–94, 205
Friedan, Betty, 83, 93, 106 Getz, Dave, 29, 148
Friedman, Myra, 149 Gilder, George, 111
Frith, Simon, 48 Gill, John, 146
Frum, David, 52 Ginsberg, Allen, 26, 36, 148, 150
Funk music, 205, 270n2 Gitlin, Todd, 47, 53, 64–65, 67, 68,
233n160
Gamble, Kenneth, 173, 275–76n66 Gleason, Ralph, 26, 29, 36, 168
Gangsta rap, 190 Goldhaft, Judy, 48
Garber, Marjorie, 146, 154 Goldstein, Richard, 182
Garcia, Jerry, 23, 27, 31, 33 Goodman, Benny, 200
Gates, Henry Louis, 59, 191 Gopnik, Adam, 157
Gaye, Marvin, 171, 176 Gordy, Berry, 169, 170–71, 275n66
Gay liberation movement: discos and Gottlieb, Carl, 30, 35, 50
bath houses as adhesive, 181–82; Graham, Bill, 36, 39, 229–30n95
and “gay is good,” 148–49; gay Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
rights movement, 138, 139; as Five, 188
transformative, 150. See also Grateful Dead, 18, 27, 32, 33, 39, 45
Historiography of gays and Gravenites, Linda, 42
lesbians; Homosexuality Green, Al, 172–73
Gay New York, 135, 136 Greenwich Village, 57
Gearhart, Sally, 111, 112, 122 Grogan, Emmett, 34, 43, 49, 223n2
Gender: Beat versus hippie attitudes, Guerin, John, 216
34–35; biological determinism of Guralnick, Peter, 169
differences, 111–12; constructed- Guthrie, Arlo, 45
ness and “performativity,” 153; and
women’s liberation movement, 84; Haight-Ashbury: contrasted to North
music as refuge from conventions Beach and Beats, 148; drugs de-
of, 219–21; and New Left, 66–69; stabilizing, 42–43; as epicenter of
refusal of difference by radical hippie counterculture, 17; flooded
292 Index
Haight-Ashbury (continued) demonization of maleness and, by

with lost kids, 42–45; as hyped-up antipornography movement, 123;
caricature, 42; newcomers out- as male rapaciousness and female
numbering hippies, 232n137; rock victimization, 121, 126; as rein-
as key to popularity of, 18, 19; forcing women’s oppression,
superseding North Beach as 98–99, 100; as suspect for
bohemian center of hipness, 9, 19– feminists, 116
21; weirdness and decline, 42–46. Hetfield, James, 282–83n143
See also Counterculture; Hippies Hilburn, Robert, 209
Hairstyles, 3, 19, 20, 137, 148 “Hillbilly cats” and “wiggers,” 190,
Hall, Murray, 151 244n53
Hall, Radclyffe, 133 Hinckle, Warren, 43, 223n2
Hallinan, Terence, 28 Hip-hop culture, 187, 190, 192. See also
Halperin, David, 134 Rap music
Ham, Bill, 29 Hippies: beatniks coexisting with,
Hammond, John Paul, 158, 198–200 30–31; compared to Beats’
Hammond, John, Sr., 199, 200 attitudes, 33–34; desire to live
Haraway, Donna, 105 recklessly, 31; differences from
Harlem Renaissance, 191 Beatniks, 32–33; as dopey
Harrison, George, 274n53 optimists, 30; as flower children,
Hathaway, Donny, 172 30; music featuring dread and
Hayden, Tom, 54, 64, 65, 67, 86 foreboding, 32; popular culture as
Hayes, Isaac, 173–74, 186, 274n46 site of resistance and subversion, 9;
Haynie, Jim, 22, 35, 38 as silly, 18, 30; as “straight,” 147–
Health food, 48 48; “treating women like squaws,”
Hedonism, 9, 48, 59 34; as unpopular label, 29–30. See
Heimel, Cynthia, 40 also Counterculture; Haight-
Hell’s Angels, 36, 43–44, 46, 50 Ashbury
Helms, Chet, 30, 36 Historiography of gays and lesbians:
Hendrix, Jimi: appreciation of Joni acknowledged differences margin-
Mitchell, 217–18; discovery by alizing women, 142; Buffalo’s
Hammond, 198; in drug scene, 49; butch-femme bar culture, 136;
guitar-handling style, 222; interest challenges to focus on community,
in R&B, 270n5; music linked to 141; class considerations, 135;
white rock, 167; problem of self- comparing experiences of lesbians
presentation, 192; as "stoned and gay men, 265n28; connections
clown," 283n154 between gay men and lesbians, 139;
Heroin, 42 criticism of searching for replicas
Herrnstein, Richard, 154 of ourselves, 134; difficulty of joint
Heterosexuality: as culturally, not gay and lesbian focus, 138; entry of
biologically, mandated, 114–15; “real live lesbians,” 132–33; gays in
Index 293
American social history, 135; of 243–44n48; of rock music, 8;

hetero-homosexual binarism, sexism of films about the sixties,
135–36; lesbianism, 131–32, 61–62, 64; still ideologically
264n11; of male homosexuality, contested, 61–62; unrepentant
133–34; moving beyond study of documentaries, 61; by white male
self-identified subjects, 140–41; new leftists standing as represen-
oral histories, 136; privileging tative, 64; of women’s liberation
sexual fringe, 141–44; reluctance to movement, 4, 6–7, 245–46n9
explore role of effeminacy, 133–34; Hoch, Danny, 190, 191, 283n145
rise of queer theory and studies, Hoffman, Abbie, 46
140–44, 265–66n31, 266n39, Holleran, Andrew, 183
267n50; seeing some acceptance, Holt, Tom, 73
129; sexual absolutism as exclu- Homophobia: in hippie counterculture,
sionary, 140–41; shift toward 33–34; in historical American
combined gay and lesbian focus, society, 135; in movements of
138–40; Victorians, 130–31 sixties, 12; and racism at root of
Historiography of sixties: affirming discophobia, 162–63
egalitarian, democratic vision of Homosexuality: among ancient Greeks,
movements, 62; antiwar movement 134; characterization of, 138; as
ignored in some accounts of critique of normalization, 141–42;
women’s liberation movement, cultural feminism on gay male
237–38n4; bumper crops of subculture, 121; with hierarchy of
memoirs and documentaries, 51; perversion, 141–42; medical
conservatism overlooked, 234n4; discourse on, 133; preoccupation
counterculture depicted in Scars of with regulating sexual identity, 150;
Sweet Paradise, 8, 9; as cultural Stonewall uprising (1969), 135;
studies, 157, 194; depicting straight-gay dichotomy as pre-
women’s liberation movement and condition of activism, 136. See also
New Left as opposed, 63; dichot- Gay liberation movement;
omizing “good” and “bad,” 66; Historiography of gays and
failures of leftist and feminist lesbians; Lesbianism
constructions, 71–72; by feminists Hoover, J. Edgar, 18
as mainly cynical about leftist men, “Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-
69, 70; few autobiographies from Ashbury,” 9, 16, 17–50
black radicals, 63; lacking on Howe, Irving, 53, 249n39
counterculture, 15, 17, 18; margin- Huff, Leon, 173, 275–76n66
alization of women’s liberation Hughes, Langston, 191
movement, 62, 63, 74; as period of Hughes, Walter, 162, 183, 185
destructive disintegration, 66; Human Be-In (1967), 42
recommendations for, 72–74; Hundgen, Richard, 22
resource mobilization theory, Hunter, George, 28
294 Index
Hurston, Zora Neal, 191 Kerouac, Jack, 32–33, 227n68

Huxley, Aldous, 23 Kerr, Clark, 19
Hynde, Chrissie, 221 Kesey, Ken, 17, 26, 27, 29, 43, 45, 49
“Hype,” 40 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 78
Klein, Larry, 216
Ice Palace, 182 Koedt, Anne, 90, 115
Identity politics, 12–13, 72, 91–94, Kopkind, Andrew, 80, 180–81, 182, 183
252n74 Kravitz, Lenny, 158
“The Ike Age: Rethinking the 1950s,” Kreps, Bonnie, 110
12, 51–60
Integration, 59–60 Labor. See Working class, labor,
Isserman, Maurice, 53, 54, 67 unionism
“Labor metaphysic,” 70, 81, 91
Jackson, Jack, 43 Langer, Elinor, 70
Jackson, Michael, 187, 280–81n127 Lauretis, Teresa de, 142
Jagger, Mick, 146 League for Industrial Democracy (LID),
Jefferson Airplane, 41 54, 251n64
Johnston, Jill, 146 Leary, Timothy, 27, 34, 46
Jones, Hettie, 56, 57 Lennon, John, 213, 274n46
Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 57, 87 Lesbianism: attempts to redefine
Joplin, Janis: closing rock’s “girl gap,” asexually, 131–32; butch-femme
11; moving away from Haight- roles, 129–30, 132, 136–38, 139, 153;
Ashbury, 45; as original bad girl, 8; cultural stereotype, 2–3; disapproval
as part of Beat scene of North of male homosexuality, 129;
Beach, 148; as screwed-up hippie feminism and, 114; hairstyles, 3,
chick, poster child of sixties 137; as matter of political principle,
dysfunctionality, 8–9; seeing 129, 131; need to dissociate from
herself as cultural provocateur, male homosexuality, 122–23; in
41–42; subject of “ ‘Thousands of passionate romantic friendships of
Men and Few Hundred Women’,” Victorian period, 130–31; power as
96, 145–50; sexuality, 145–50; as sexy rather than oppressive, 132;
symbol of seismic changes of separatism from men, 115; working-
sixties, 53, 145–50; as victim of drug class, 133. See also Historiography of
overdose, 49; wanting “something gays and lesbians; Homosexuality
now rather than a little of hardly Lesch, Phil, 24
anything over seventy years,” 23 Levan, Larry, 183
Levay, Simon, 154
Kantner, Paul, 39 Liberalism: black radicals rejecting,
Katz, Jonathan Ned, 129 80; as both compromised and
Kelley, Alton, 29, 36, 229–30n95 compromising, 81; corporate versus
Kennedy, Elizabeth, 133, 136–38 humanist, 80; grassroots rebellion
Index 295
against, 58; sixties radicals’ Mead, Margaret, 58

complex relationship to, 78, 79–81; Media: determining nature of Haight-
women’s liberation movement’s Ashbury, 42; slow to see signifi-
rejection of, 82–83 cance of hippie counterculture, 31
LID (League for Industrial Democracy), Meisel, Perry, 215
54, 251n64 Melvin, Milan, 30
Light shows, 29 Mercer, Kobena, 93
Lindsey, Karen, 117 Merry Pranksters, 27, 32, 33, 49
Lipsitz, George, 58, 157, 194 Meyerowitz, Joanne, 56
Locks, Seymour, 29 Miller, Arthur, 20, 81–82
The Loft, 182, 183 Miller, James, 53, 67
Lomax, Alan, 26, 200 Miller, Steve, 38
Longshoremen’s Union, 36 Mills, C. Wright, 67, 81, 89
Lorde, Audre, 93 Mingus, Charles, 216, 218
Lott, Eric, 157, 193, 195, 196, 197 Minstrelsy. See Blackface minstrelsy
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and Miss America Pageant, women’s liber-
the American Working Class, 193 ation movement’s protest at, 75–77
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,
“acid,” 19, 20, 23, 27, 34, 43 86
Lydon, Johnny (aka Rotten), 162 Mitchell, Joni: alien “Martian” outlook,
Lynd, Staughton, 86 217; as androgynous, 221–22;
beginnings in folk music, 211, 212;
McClure, Michael, 43 challenging equation of greatness
MacDonald, Fred, 189 with maleness, 222; confidence in
MacKinnon, Catharine, 6, 96, 97–102 her music, 208, 209; as disowned,
McLean, Don, 277n88 orphaned, exiled, and free, 210–11;
McNeil, Don, 45 Dylan’s appreciation of, 218–19;
Madonna, 161 education of, 211; experiments with
Mailer, Norman, 168, 190 bass handling melody, 215; guitar as
Mandela, Nelson, 277–78n95 portable lover, 212; interest in
Marcus, Greil, 177, 193, 194 singing standards, 216–17; kinship
Marcuse, Herbert, 81 with black artists on periphery, 217;
Marijuana, 42 line between femininity and
Marin County, 46 masculinity, 222; making raceless,
Marsh, Dave, 177, 178 genderless music, 218; marriages
Marxism, 82, 104, 105, 108 and divorces, 212, 216, 221; musical
Matthews, Tracye, 238n6 influences, 212; music as refuge
Max, Steve, 68 from conventions of gender, 219–21;
May, Elaine Tyler, 57 origins of interview, 158; parental
Mayfield, Curtis, 186 disapproval, 209–11; from popular-
Mazur, Crystal, 28 ity to black hole to popularity again,
296 Index
Mitchell, Joni (continued) Movie soundtracks: Shaft movie theme

208–9; rejecting terminally song, 174; Superfly, 178
unhappy hippie girl, 215; success MTV, 186–87, 189, 190, 204
followed by change of pace and Murray, Charles, 154, 283n154
critical backlash, 214–16; success in Music: British Invasion, 24; high-tech,
1970s, 213; vulnerability, 221–22 low-tech, and “manufactured,”
Mitchell, Juliet, 104 205–6; of hippies featuring dread
Monk, Charlie, 282n143 and foreboding, 32; new breed of
Monk, Thelonious, 174 promoters, 37; psychedelics cre-
Monterey International Pop Festival ating need for more sound, electri-
(June 1967), 18, 39–40 fication, 23–24, 25, 26–27; record
Morgan, Robin: on biological deter- companies, 58, 87. See also Disco
minism, 112; denouncing New Left, music; R&B (rhythm and blues, or
69; on feminist counterinstitu- soul music); Rock ‘n’ roll music
tions, 87; on lesbian feminists, 119; Muste, A. J., 53
on Miss American Pageant protest,
77; on pornography, 123; on rele- National Women’s Party, 54, 55
vance of NOW, 83; on repudiation NCNP (National Conference for New
of sexual liberation, 124 Politics), 89
Morris, Aldon, 53 Neuwirth, Bob, 25
Morrison, Jim, 49 New Left: advancing untamed
Moses, Bob [Parris], 86 masculinity, 67; alienation by
Mother Camp: Female Impersonation in materialism, mass society, and
America, 152 hierarchies of race, gender, and
Mothers and daughters, 127 age, 81–82; androcentrism of,
Motown, 165, 168, 169–72, 176, 272n37, 66–67; and anxiety about mascu-
274n46, 276n76 linity, 66–67; beliefs and dilemmas
Moulton, Tom, 180 in common with women’s libera-
Movement, The: giving white women tion movement, 71–72; challenging
skills, confidence, and political domesticated masculinity of post-
savvy, 69–70; hostile to, but war period, 72; depicted in
influencing women’s liberation opposition to women’s liberation
movement, 79; mirroring larger movement, 63; disintegration
sexist culture, 69; pessimism about coinciding with emergence of
reform, 88; from protest to women’s liberation movement, 65;
resistance, 49; as shorthand for dismissive of women’s liberation
many overlapping movements, movement as bourgeois and
239n10, 245n6; splintering and diversionary, 70; emergence from
displacing white lefty men, 163–64; and rift with old left, 53–54, 81;
and white middle-class college equating militance with machismo,
students, 70. See also New Left liberalism with wimpiness, 241n29;
Index 297
failure of current historiography to Parties. See Dances/parties/party

engender, 62–63; as gendered circuit
generational revolt, 72, 77; identi- Pastorius, Jaco, 215
fying with those on margins (such as Patriarchy, 84
black men), 67; and “labor meta- Penelope, Julia, 119
physic,” 70, 81, 91; as problematized Penn, Donna, 143
male masculinity, 240n21; roots in Perry, Charles, 42–43, 223n2
groups of Howe, Schachtman, and Person, Ethel, 120
Muste, 53; SDS as leading group, 18; Philadelphia International Records
as willfully blind to sexism, 69, 70. (PIR), 173
See also Movement, The Pine Street Group, 35
Newport jazz festival (1965), 200 PIR (Philadelphia International
Newton, Esther, 133, 138, 139, 152 Records), 173
Newton, Huey, 49 “‘Play That Funky Music’: An
Nichols, Pat “Sunshine,” 30 Interview with Lenny Kravitz,”
1950s. See Fifties, The 201–6
1960s. See Sixties, The Politics: confused with culture, 157; as
Nomadism, 33 policing of attitudes through
North Beach, 9, 19, 148 suppression of speech, 102;
“Nothing Distant About It,” 7, 15, reformulated by Sixties radicals,
75–94 94; sixties radicals’ profound
NOW (National Organization for impact on, 89–92
Women), 82–83, 93, 121–22 Pop music, 170
Postfeminism, 99
Oakland induction center, antiwar Postmodernism, 153, 155
demonstration, 36 Poststructuralism, 4, 153, 155
Oglesby, Carl, 80 Potter, Paul, 81
Old Left, 53–54, 81 Powell, Kevin, 191
Olivia Records, 87–88 Power, conceptualizations of, 90
Open Theater, 29 Powers of Desire, 5, 6
The Organization Man, 66–67 Pranksters, 27, 32, 33, 49
Ortner, Sherry, 105 Presley, Elvis, 73, 193–94, 244n53
Otis, Johnny, 194–95 Prince, 160, 280n124, 280n127
Owens, Frank, 184 Promoters of music events, 37
Psychedelics, 23, 42
Pacifism, 55 Public Enemy, 189, 192
Paglia, Camille, 6, 99 Punk rock, 279n118
Paradise Garage, 183
Pareles, Jon, 162 “Queer Like Us?,” 96, 129–44
Parks, Rosa, 53 Queer theory and studies, 140–44,
Participatory democracy, 72, 85 265–66n31, 266n39, 267n50
298 Index
R&B (rhythm and blues, or soul on, 109–10; gender supplanted

music): artists’ exclusion from FM by sexuality as domination/
deejays’ programs, 165–66; subordination, 99; heterosexuality
breaking constraints toward pop, reinforcing women’s oppression,
“lite” soft, slick, sweet, 172–75; 98–99, 100; joining sexual
diverging from rock, 165–66; liberation with women’s liberation,
giving way to cheery party disco, 127; MacKinnon as superstar, 98,
178–79; killed by disco, 186; losing 100; ossification of, 106; risking
white rock audience, 174–75, 177; as “badness” versus good-girlism,
“party music,” 180; as product of 103, 105, 107, 108; sexuality as
musical miscegenation, 170; R&B difficult and contested area, 109;
and soul as interchangeable terms, “smile boycott,” 107; transforming
272n24; racial crossover concept, American culture and society, 8. See
169, 186; reflecting black dis- also Cultural feminism; Feminism
illusionment and despair, 178; Radicalism: cultural, 48; as original
reflecting new black consciousness, and hopeful, 78; as rethinking of
175; white aficionados turning fundamental social organization, 77
backs on black artists, 10; whites Radio: deejays’ networks for disco
turning from, 160 publicity and record distribution,
Rabinowitz, Paula, 67 180; KPFA in Pacifica, 29; move to
Race riots, 52 adult-oriented “classic” rock, 166;
Racism: in feminism, 108; and homo- programming resembling that of
phobia at root of discophobia, 162– ballrooms, 272n28; racial
63; role in defeat of unionism, 58; segmenting of rock programs,
and sexism in field of music 166–67; rock desegregating radio
criticism, 167–68; in white waves, 73; rock’s move to FM band,
backlash against fair-housing 165; targeting specific listener
policies, 58 groups, 58
Radical feminism: attacks on family, Rap music: becoming co-ed, 192; cross-
105–6; as both leftist and feminist, racial popularity, 189–91; differing
70; celebrations of Goddess strands of, 284n157; gangsta rap
Mother, 105; centrality of left-wing meeting rage quotient for white
thinking to, 7; comparison to teens, 190; generation gap between
cultural feminism, 7, 112–14; as both black and whites, 282n143;
contentious and conflicted, 7; homophobia and misogyny in, 187;
criticism of Roe v Wade, 100; as “realness,” 188; reifying race,
cultural anxiety about provision of 192; as celebration of urban black
caretaking, 106; dualistic approach masculinity, 187–88; as whites’
to sexuality, 116–18; gender fascination with black masculinity,
difference, refusal of, 106–7; 197
gender, shifts in feminist thinking Raymond, Janice, 110, 111, 121, 122, 152
Index 299
Record companies: Atlantic Records, mobility, 181; challenging

273n43; Motown, 165, 168, 169–72, domesticated masculinity of
176, 272n37, 274n46, 276n76; PIR postwar period, 72–73; changing
(Philadelphia International meaning of “whiteness,” 73;
Records), 173; proliferation after commercialization of, 40–42,
WWII, 58; Stax Records, 173, 47–48; committed to eclecticism
272n37 and experimentation, 38; as
Redding, Otis, 39, 159, 168, 172 cultural revolt wrought by
Red Dog Saloon, 35, 44 musicians, 41; dances replaced by
Reed, Ishmael, 187 stadium rock, 47, 166, 179;
Reeves, Martha, 275n57 desegregating radio waves, 73;
“Refuge of the Lions’ Den,” 158, disrupting racial boundaries,
198–200 shifting color line, 73, 159–60,
Reproductive rights: abortion, 84, 86, 201–2; early amateurism,
242n37, 249n36; contraception/ primitiveness, 37–39; faked black
birth control pill, 79, 117; cyber- southern dialects in, 218; fans as
nation, 104–5, 106; forced repro- racist, sexist, and homophobic,
duction and forced sterilization, 163–64; historiography of, 8; as
249n36 improvisational, 166; as key to
Resner, Bill, 28 Haight’s popularity, 18; move to FM
Resner, Hillel, 28 radio band, 165; as “next million
Resource mobilization theory, dollar business,” 40; origins in
243–44n48 Great Migration, 58; precarious
Reunion: A Memoir, 64, 65 position of women artists/
Rich, Adrienne: female biology, 111–12; musicians, 11–12; as product of
on female heterosexuality and musical miscegenation, 170; as
lesbianism, 121, 122, 131, 138; on racially progressive impulse, 194;
female sexuality, 120; on racial segmenting of radio’s rock
patriarchy, 84; on “snow programs, 166–67; on radio, move
blindness,” 108; on women’s to adult-oriented “classic” rock,
liberation movement, 88 166; reemergence of color line in
Richards, Keith, 165 1981, 160; “San Francisco sound,”
Rifkin, Danny, 34 38; seen as “white,” 12; sexism and
Rivers, Travis, 35 racism in field of music criticism,
Robertson, Pat, 51 167–68; as sexual anticipation, 185;
Robinson, Smokey, 171 show business, 39; Sly Stone
Rockefeller, Abby, 114, 115, 118 obscuring color line, 159–60;
Rock ’n’ roll music: as arty, strong masculinist bias, 11–12; as
pretentious, less danceable, 179; as syncretism, 194; transforming
blackface minstrelsy, 193; as America’s cultural landscape,
bohemian fantasy of downward 41–42. See also Mitchell, Joni
300 Index
Rodgers, Nile, 179 counterculture, 49; move to

Roe v Wade, criticism of, 100 San Francisco, 20; newcomers
Roiphe, Katie, 99 outnumbering hippies in Haight-
“A Rolling stone gathers no moss,” Ashbury, 232n137; recalling
72–73 psychedelics, 23; on unraveling of
Rolling Stone magazine, 40, 73, 167 Haight-Ashbury, 42
Rolling Stones group, 24, 46, 59, 160 Seventies, as origin of many current
Romero, Elias, 29 trends, 52
Rooney, Jim, 25 Sexism: in hippie counterculture,
Rose, Tricia, 192, 282n142 34–35; in movements of sixties, 12;
Ross, Diana, 171 in New Left, 69; and racism in field
Rosenfelt, Deborah, 71 of music criticism, 167–68
Rothchild, Paul, 26 Sex Panic group, 143
Rotten (Johnny Lydon), 162 Sexuality: antipornography movement
Rubin, Gayle, 5 dichotomizing male versus female,
Rubin, Jerry, 46, 91 4–5; bisexuality as “unreliable,” 3;
Run-D.M.C., 189 cultural feminism’s demonization
Rupp, Leila, 54 of, 110; as dangerous, 118–21; as
Rush, Florence, 112 difficult and contested area for
Russell, Diana, 125 radical feminism, 109; as
domination/subordination
Sanders, Ed, 45 supplanting gender, 99; feminism
San Francisco Mime Troupe, 29, 36 as prudish, 96; feminism’s link to
“San Francisco sound,” 38 sexual freedom, 95; feminism’s
Sarachild, Kathie, 70, 92 multiple viewpoints; Firestone’s
Savio, Mario, 49, 155 dialectic of sex, 103–8; gender as
Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and constructedness, “performativity,”
Times of Janis Joplin, 8–9 and impersonation, 153; as histor-
Schachtman, Max, 53 ically and socially constructed,
Scheer, Robert, 37 versus essentialism, 265–66n31;
SDS (Students for a Democratic male compared to female, 120–22;
Society), 1, 18, 54, 66, 89–90 need for feminist understanding of,
Sedgwick, Eve, 142 127–28; prescriptivism and
Seeger, Pete, 26 orthodoxy, 123; radical feminists’
Segregation/Jim Crow, 59–60, 134–35 dualistic approach to, 116–18;
Seidemann, Bob: on darkness, sexism, sexual-harassment law, 101; s/m
racism of Haight-Ashbury experi- lesbian-feminists, 263n83; social
ence, 31, 34, 35, 45; desirability historians dissecting gender, 4; as
of “old timey” look in Haight- socially conditioned, 114; trans-
Ashbury, 22; as “freak,” not gendered, 151; transsexualism, 121;
hippie, 30; on intensity of as worker-boss relationship, 100.
Index 301
See also Heterosexuality; reformism, 71, 89; as “identity

Homosexuality; Lesbianism politics,” 12–13, 72, 91–94, 252n74;
Sexual revolution, as mixed blessing and Marxism, 82; as path to self-
for women, 34 fulfillment, 90–91; participatory
Sex Wars (feminist), 132, 138 democracy, 72, 85; profound impact
Shaft movie theme song, 174 on conventional politics, 89–92;
“Shaky Ground: Popular Music in the romanticizing the poor, 68. See also
Disco Years,” 158, 159–92 Black radicals
Shorter, Wayne, 218 Slick, Darby, 36, 49
Shulman, Alix Kates, 185 Sly and the Family Stone, 159
Simmons, Bob, 30 “Smile boycott,” 107
Simms, Tracy, 28 Smith, Patti, 107
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 130–31
64–65 SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Sixties, The: beginning (at Coordinating Committee), 86
Greensboro) and end (at Kent Snitow, Ann, 5, 77, 107
State) of radicalism, 64; Solomon, Carl, 148
characterized as decade of disorder, Soul music. See R&B (rhythm and
permissiveness, black and female blues, or soul music)
assertiveness, 61; conservatism “The Soul of a Martian: A Conversation
overlooked by historians, 234n4; as with Joni Mitchell,” 158, 207–22
crash-and-burn decade, 51; as Speed, 42
gendered generational revolt, 72, Stacey, Judith, 71
77; illuminated in 50-year Stadium rock, 47, 166, 179
perspective, 12; Joplin as icon of, Stanley, “Owsley” Augustus Owsley III,
147; politicians’ and historians’ 23
obsession with, 51–52; as radical- Stansell, Christine, 5, 130
ism and rethinking of fundamental Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 131
social organization, 77; still engen- Staples, Pop, 200
dering ideological contestation, Starr, Edwin, 176
61–62 Stax Records, 173, 272n37
Sixties radicals: achievements of, 94; Stein, Arlene, 88
admiring renegade, antidomesticity Sting, 217
of marginal men, 68; alternatives to Stone, Sandy, 153–54
domesticity, 63, 67, 68–69; belief Stone, Sly, 159–60, 176–78, 186,
in alternative institutions, 86; 191–92
borrowing from other movements, Stonewall, 138
84–85; complex relationship to Stonewall Inn (Greenwich Village)
liberalism, 78, 79–81; conflict with riots, 139, 149
old leftists, 81; failure to distin- Student Nonviolent Coordinating
guish between reform and Committee (SNCC), 86
302 Index
Sugar Hill Gang, 188 Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on
Sugrue, Thomas, 52, 58, 234n4 Central Avenue, 194–95
Summer, Donna, 186 Upski (Billy Wimsatt), 190–91
Summer of Love (1967), 44–45, 46
Sunset Strip (Hollywood) protest Vance, Carole, 5
(1966), 227n65 Vanilla Ice, 189–91
Superfly movie soundtrack, 178 Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and
Supremes, 168, 171, 274n53, 275n57 Cultural Anxiety, 154
Swartley, Ariel, 215 Vietnam War: antiwar demonstration at
Swerdlow, Amy, 55 Oakland induction center, 36; and
fear of draft, 31–32
“The Taming of the Id,” 5, 95, 109–28, Von Schmidt, Eric, 25
254
Taylor, Johnnie, 281n129 Wald, Alan, 54
Television, 59; and MTV, 186–87, 189, Warner, Michael, 141, 143
190, 204 Waters, Muddy, 73
Temptations, 176 Weatherman, 1, 49
Terry, Jennifer, 133 Weeks, Jeffrey, 252n75
Thaw, Harry, 142 “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” 7, 15,
Thompson, Hunter S., 31 61–74, 236
Thompson, Sharon, 5 Weir, Bob, 41
“ ‘Thousands of Men and Few Hundred Welfare, 22, 35
Women’,” 96, 145–50 Wenner, Jann, 40
Tie dye fad, 21 White, Barry, 174, 180, 185, 186
Touré, 188 White, Edmund, 149, 181
Townshend, Pete, 44 White, Joshua, 32, 38, 47
Transgender, transsexuals, and gender “White Faces, Black Masks,” 157,
ambiguity, 151–55 193–97
The Transsexual Empire, 152 White youths: fascination with
Transsexualism, 121 blackness, 10, 67–68, 187, 190,
The Transsexual Phenomenon, 154 193–97, 244n53; longing for
Transvestitism, drag, and cross- connection, values, rebellion, 58;
dressing, 152–53, 269n18 and Movement radicals, 70;
Trumbach, Randolph, 134 recklessness and search for
“Turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra, meaning and stimulation, 59;
46 risk-taking, 59; turning from R&B,
160, 174–75, 177
Umphrey, Martha, 142 Whole Earth Catalog, 47
Undisputed Truth, 176 Whyte, William, 66
Unionism. See Working class, labor, “Wiggers” and “hillbilly cats,” 190,
unionism 244n53
Index 303
Willis, Ellen, 48, 70, 84, 95, 103 histories of Movement, 245–46n9;
Wilson, Dagmar, 55 Marxist ideology, 82; New Left, as
Wilson, Mary, 171, 275n57 opposed to, 63; New Left, beliefs
Wimsatt, Billy (aka Upski), 190–91 and dilemmas in common with,
Wolf, Howlin,’ 199 71–72; New Left, related to collapse
Wolfe, Tom, 17, 20 of, 65; New Left, undergirded by
Woman-bonding, 116 breakthroughs of, 71–72; origins in
Women artists/musicians: disco’s emancipatory possibilities of
elevation of divas, 187; precarious fifties, 59; “personal is political,”
position in world of rock, 11–12. See 89–90, 91; political correctness in,
also Joplin, Janis; Mitchell, Joni 91; protest at Democratic National
Women’s liberation movement: Convention, 76–77; protest at Miss
achieving fundamental realignment America Pageant, 75–77; as
of gender roles, 94; advocating quintessentially sixties movement,
self-assertion and unlearning of 77; as rebellion against ultra-
niceness, 90; and antiwar move- domestic fifties, 63; rejection of
ment, 237–38n4; appropriating liberalism, 82–83; scapegoating of,
critiques of colonialism, 70; both 62; summary of stands, 85; taking
hostility and influence from The issue with liberal feminists, 83;
Movement, 79; as bourgeois and women in labor force, 78–79;
diversionary, 70; bra-burning by women’s bodies as “colonized,” 84
militants, 76; commitment to Women’s studies programs: boundary
developing utopian counter- between good and bad feminism, 3;
institutions, 85–88; conflict over at University of Michigan, 3–4; at
antipornography movement, 100; University of New Mexico, 2
consciousness raising and sister- Women Strike for Peace, 54, 55
hood, 92; desire to remake world, Wonder, Stevie, 171–72, 178
83–84; as disintegration of Woodstock rock festival (1969), 46–
“beloved community,” 65–66; 47
Firestone’s retirement from, Woodul, Jennifer, 87
103–4, 107; formation of credit Woodward, C. Vann, 134–35
unions, 87; and gender, 84; as Working class, labor, unionism, 58, 81,
gendered generational revolt, 72, 82, 91, 133, 180–81
77–78; historiography, 4, 6–7; Working-class origins, 180–81
indicting capitalism, 84; inspired Workman, Skip, 50
by risktaking and antiauthori- Wright, Richard, 191
tarianism of radicals, 50; internal
egalitarianism and “tyranny of Yarrow, Peter, 26
structurelessness,” 85, 89, 103; Yippies, 28, 46, 76, 245n4
marginalization in histories of
sixties, 62, 63, 74; marginalized in Zulu Nation group, 281n134

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SHAKY

columbia university press • new york

Copyright © 2002 Alice Echols

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

E839.4 .E28 2001

Columbia University Press books are printed

Printed in the United States of America

Part 1 Postwar America and the 1960s:

Part 2 Feminism, Sexual Freedom,

7. The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968–1983

Part 3 Turn the Beat Around 157

trenchant criticisms that proved invaluable. Throughout, my musician

I was intrigued by the Movement, even its debased Weatherman version,

in history. My intellectual home, however, was women’s studies. Michigan’s

pie chick, the poster child of sixties dysfunctionality. Of course, in certain

women’s vexed relationship to rock in a long profile of singer-songwriter

from Joplin’s story to be included in Scars—so I decided to fashion a

This essay was previously published in somewhat different form in Scars of

speaking at the 1960 republican national convention, FBI chief J.

written by America’s unprecedented prosperity.13 In the Haight virtually

wearing super-tight, silver pants made from metallic cloth—designer re-

and to match in some way the monumental stimulus—the high-voltage

true of the activists at San Francisco State. In fact, political demonstrations

best-known Beat brought him both painful opprobrium and debilitating

Haight was “overwhelmingly heterosexual.”74 Timothy Leary even pro-

she argued, people’s ability “to be the unconscious instruments of values

haight-ashbury was still an insider’s secret through much of 1966, but

decline came as something of a shock. To many, the Summer of Love stood as

in woodstock’s aftermath, radical activist Todd Gitlin asked “whether

This essay is a revised version of “Fiftiesomething,” which appeared in the

marily dismissed as America’s “Dark Ages,” a wasteland of hula hoops,

wives. As anthropologist Margaret Mead noted, this “continuous harping”

By the mid-’60s the tensions and contradictions of the postwar period

Predictably, Hollywood’s record is more mixed. But certainly Oliver

remapping should be understood as a political intervention, one that seeks

the marginalization of the women’s liberation movement in sixties

Gitlin analyzes with great perceptiveness the emotional divide separating

final nail in the coffin of the “beloved community” and it is remembered

gers of the Organization Man and the “other-directed personality,” at-

authentically masculine. This dynamic was at work in community-organiz-

if new left men have produced a problematic rendering of the sixties, so

power to describe women’s oppression and legitimate their struggle. Over

feminism, it nevertheless gave women considerable intellectual ammuni-

the remapping of the sixties that I envision would involve a narrative

false eyelashes, typing books, and representative copies of Cosmopolitan,

understood as part of a gendered generational revolt against the ultra-

women’s discontent with their place in America in the 1960s was, of

tion was facilitated as well by the growing number of women graduating

and in large part in response to liberals’ specific defaults—their failure to

ident Johnson concluded a nationally televised speech on civil rights by

women’s liberationists, NOW’s integrationist, access-oriented approach

talked of ending sex discrimination, women’s liberationists called for noth-

mixed results at best. In fact, women’s liberationists challenged not only

anticipate the desired society of the future.42 Staughton Lynd, director of

nist bookstore. In Detroit after “a long struggle to translate feminism into

troubles and organize to change society.”63 Theirs was a more expansive

eventually, sexual orientation/preference were the salient categories for

Some readers might find my linking of feminism and sexual freedom

of this shift within the movement led me to attribute more ideological