Free love: Was there a price to pay?

Brian Alexander • E-mail

To hear the ex-hippies and Summer of Love enthusiasts tell it, the spring and summer of 1967 in San Francisco changed everything, especially sex.

At first, this sounds like more of the same generational hagiography from baby boomers that we’ve been subjected to for several decades now. But there is no question that we are still living with the “free love” fallout. Everything from the rise of Viagra to “Girls Gone Wild” and feminist porn, to the sex education debate and the Christian fundamentalist backlash, bears the mark of that bohemian sexual revolution.

The lingering image of the Summer of Love has been one of bare-breasted flower children making love in patchouli-scented crash pads, sharing their food, their money and their partners.

The real story is more complex.

'From idealism to despair'
Many problems have been glossed over in the psychedelic, Jefferson Airplane, “make love, not war” sheen the era has received, not least of which was the soaring rate of sexually transmitted diseases. There was a price for all that free love. From 1964 through 1968, the rates of syphilis and gonorrhea in California rose 165 percent, according to published reports.

“There was a lot of drug use, group sex, communal sex,” says Dr. David Smith, who founded the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic with $500 of his own money. “It would be an understatement to say there was a spike in STDs. That’s like saying a hurricane is a strong wind.”

Clinic doctors would regularly visit local communes to track sexual partners of infected people.

“Well, Bill had sex with John, and John had sex with Cindy,” explains Smith. “So we often said, ‘Well, let’s just bring in a gallon of penicillin and inject everybody.’”

Smith sums up his feelings about how the scene degenerated from carefree experimentation into a disease-ridden mess: “We went from idealism to despair.”

Echoes of the sexual stew
The repercussions of women’s burgeoning sexual freedom and the rise of venereal diseases during the late 1960s still echo politically today.

When former speaker of the House of Representatives Tom DeLay stated in 2003 that, “For the last 40 years, the anti-Christian left in America has waged a sustained attack against ... traditional moral norms,” he was referring to the sexual stew that boiled over during the Summer of Love.

Today, abstinence-only sex education advocates blame the excesses of the 1960s for the rise of new kinds of STDs such as AIDS and herpes. They commonly assert that syphilis and gonorrhea were the only two STDs in existence until the 1960s, but that dozens have emerged since.

Of course, that wasn’t true. The hippies may have spread a lot of nasty bugs amongst themselves, but they didn’t create the STD epidemic. Other STDs, such as human papillomavirus, existed long before, but were as yet unidentified. Rates of syphilis and gonorrhea were so bad during World War I that the government had to mount a nationwide campaign against them or face a shortage of soldiers.

Abortion was another issue that erupted during Summer of Love. By the end of the summer, many women, some of them young teenagers, needed treatment for botched abortions. Though then-governor Ronald Reagan signed a liberalized abortion law in June of 1967, trips to Tijuana, Mexico, for back-alley procedures were common. Smith’s clinic even treated Big Brother and the Holding Company singer Janis Joplin for a mishandled Mexican abortion. She became a benefactor of the clinic.

Henry Diltz / Corbis Two hippie women dancing at a love-in in June 1967. It didn't take long for many women to realize the sexual freedoms of the period didn't necessarily change their role in society.

Such experiences with abortions gone bad helped lead some states to further liberalize their abortion laws until 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, a ruling that still divides Americans.

Not a smooth ride
The Summer of Love may be remembered for its rejection of middle-class morality, but the hippies trekking into San Francisco didn’t create the concept of free love. It’s an idea that traces back to the 19^th-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelly, up through the suffragettes and the American jazz age of the early 1900s. Post-World War II social changes further hastened the liberalization of sex in the United States, along with the Beat poets, the coffeehouse scene and the comedian Lenny Bruce, who helped heat up the sexual conversation in America.

Sexual culture was already in flux before the first tie-dyed teenage runaway hitched a ride to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Playboy’s first issue had arrived 14 years earlier in December of 1953. The birth control pill became widely available in 1960. Researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson published “Human Sexual Response,” the best-selling masterpiece of human physiology and anatomy, in 1966. In May of 1967, a Michigan youth commission recommended sex education be introduced into the schools. Throughout the year, formerly single-sex colleges announced they were going co-ed.

Nevertheless, many of the “love the one you’re with” enthusiasts of the 1960s were about to discover that the free-love train was not going to be a smooth ride.

It didn’t take long for many women to realize that the sexual freedoms associated with the hippie era didn't necessarily change their role in mainstream America — they just wore different costumes.

As black activist Stokely Carmichael famously put it, “The only position for women in the movement is prone.” He may have been talking about the civil rights struggle, but many of the scruffy Summer of Love scenesters viewed women in a similar way.

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