“You Are Your Own Alternative”: Performance, Pleasure, and the American Counterculture, 1965-1975 Mark Joseph Abraham A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HISTORY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO 9 May 2014 © Mark Joseph Abraham, 2014 Abstract “You Are Your Own Alternative” examines influential countercultural groups in the 1960s and 1970s. In opposition to historians who dismiss the politics of the counterculture and blame the counterculture for contributing to the collapse of social movement activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this dissertation highlights the intensely political and productive aspects of the counterculture. With case studies that focus on the Los Angeles Freaks, the San Francisco Diggers, the New York Yippies, and the lesbian feminists of Olivia Records, “You Are Your Own Alternative” demonstrates that the counterculture offered powerful political and performative challenges in this period. Countercultural activists valorized free expressions of sexuality; outlandishly adorned bodies; complex music; theatrical celebrations of community; and free access to collective resources like food, clothing, and health care. They staged participatory performance-based protests intended to seduce passersby into experiencing new paradigms of human interaction and expression. In joining in to act out, countercultural activists argued, new converts would discover, through performance and pleasure, their authentic selves. But while “You are Your Own Alternative” emphatically argues that each of the four countercultural groups it examines was radical, progressive, political, and thoughtful about the way it conceptualized the dominant order and the performance-based methods of activism that could be used to resist that order, it also critiques these countercultural groups for the limitations of their vision; for their problematic politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality; and for their failure to move beyond narrowly advocating for what I call “alternative norms,” which countercultural leaders suggested were simultaneously authentic and universal. The result is a set of arguments that casts new light on the counterculture and the changing nature of political protest and cultural resistance in the post-1960s era. ii Acknowledgements In writing and researching this dissertation, I owe a great debt to many people and organizations. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, the Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant program, the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University, and the Graduate Program in History at York University have all generously provided financial support for this dissertation. This funding allowed me to conduct research at universities and independent archives in cities across the United States, including New York, Ithaca, Ann Arbor, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I feel incredibly blessed to have benefitted from the support and wisdom of a superb supervisory team. My supervisor Marc Stein deserves thanks for his guidance, enthusiasm, and support for this project from the earliest stages of its writing; his insight, questions, and clinical attention to detail have strengthened the writing and analysis of this dissertation in innumerable ways. I want to thank Molly Ladd-Taylor for her incisive critiques and her reminders to remember the broader intellectual context my subjects operated within, as well as for those many times where a carefully worded question directed at the larger purpose of this dissertation helped me to reframe and better articulate my arguments. Finally, I want to thank Anne Rubenstein for her encyclopedic knowledge of progressive (and not-so-progressive) artists, musicians, and performers; this dissertation is a better cultural history for her guidance and ideas. I would also like to thank the members of my examination committee. My work has also benefitted from the assistance of many archivists and librarians. In particular, I’d like to thank Brenda J. Marston at the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University, Julie Herrada at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, Karen Sendziak at the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago, and Terence Kissack at the GLBT iii Historical Society in San Francisco, as well as the general staffs of each archive for making me feel welcome and directing me towards critical materials that I would not have found otherwise. I would also like to thank everybody in the Graduate Program in History at York University that I have had the good fortune to know and work with during my time there. Due to time spent in their classrooms, Marlene Shore, Kate McPherson, Craig Heron, and Stephen Brooke have all had some effect on the contours of this dissertation. Thanks must also go to so many of my peers who I took classes with, attended talks and conferences with, and went out for drinks with. In particular, I’d like to thank the members of my U.S./Gender/Sexualities reading group for their insightful criticisms of much of this dissertation at various points in the process of its writing: Katie Bausch, Ian McPhedran, Healy Thompson, Natalie Gravelle, Mathieu Brûlé, Merrick Pilling, Liane Cheshire, and Nathan Wilson. Finally, for their friendship, support, and humor, I’d like to thank Christine Grandy, Laura Godsoe, Sean Kheraj, and Liz O’Gorek. For their support over the years, I’d like to thank my parents, Sarah and Ed Abraham, and my brother Neil and sister Jacquelyn. Finally, I owe all the gratitude and thanks that can be mustered to my partner, Leah Wahl, for her support, encouragement, patience, and love. In direct and indirect ways, her insight and observations about pop culture, music, and theater have helped to inform and shape this dissertation. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents v Introduction: “The Free Part of Each of Us” 1 Chapter 1: “The Fire in the Heart”: The West Hollywood Freaks, 1964-67 30 Chapter 2: “Theater Is Territory”: The Haight-Ashbury Diggers, 1965-1967 87 Chapter 3: “Politics Is How You Live”: The Lower East Side Yippies, 1968-1970 143 Chapter 4: “Each of Us An Actress”: The Lesbian Nation Olivia Collective, 1973-1975 200 Conclusion: “Because We Wanted to Change the World” 258 Works Cited 276 v Introduction: “The Free Part of Each of Us”1 On 15 February 1969, the New York countercultural group Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) staged its Bridal Un-Fair protest during a bridal fair held at Madison Square Garden.2 In a 1968 manifesto, this “coven,” which included Robin Morgan, Jo Freeman, Judith Duffett, Naomi Jaffe, Florika, and Peggy Dobbin, described WITCH as “an all-women Everything. It’s theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy.” The manifesto depicts witches as “nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary”: Witches…bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all ... before the … Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society. WITCH summed up these ideas with a simple assertion: a witch was “the free part of each of us,” a revolutionary impulse that “lives and laughs in every woman.” In practice and language, WITCH played with classic witch iconography—hats, brooms, and hexes—but at heart the group asserted that a woman’s true identity was joyous, pleasurable, and sisterly.3 WITCH described the Bridal Un-Fair as a hex. Through cultural performance and creative expression, WITCH asked women attending the fair to consider the emphasis the dominant order placed on a subordinate role for women in marriage and on the notion that women were allowed an “identity only as an appendage to a man.” While not necessarily anti-marriage or anti-male, the Bridal Un-Fair celebrated the “unmarried girl” who was “considered a freak—a lesbian, or a castrating career girl, a fallen woman, a bitch, ‘unnatural,’ a frustrated old maid, sick.” 1 WITCH, “New York Covens,” reproduced in Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 539-540. 2 See Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 97-98; Eva S. Moscowitz, In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 211; Debra Michals, “From ‘Consciousness Expansion’ to ‘Consciousness Raising’: Feminism and the Countercultural Politics of the Self,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 55; Stephen Voyce, Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 178. 3 WITCH, “New York Covens,” 539-540. 1 According to WITCH, the reality was the opposite: “the bride is alone.” American middle-class culture encouraged “vulnerable young girls to be dutiful, uncomplaining … brand-conscious consumers.” Its imperatives, which WITCH labeled “empty Hollywood-Madison Avenue dreams,” suppressed women’s natural impulses for laughter and solidarity. What the dominant order labeled “unnatural” was, in fact, a natural, authentic identity for women.4 The protest was organized under the slogan “Confront the Whore-makers.” The women of WITCH entered the fair wearing