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Paradise at the Sandstone Retreat Paradise at the Sandstone Retreat: Pleasure, Perversion & the Technologies of Sexual Life During the 1960s-1970s by David Rosen This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception. Herbert Marcuse1 Mr. Williamson’s paradise of the main house. Talese, a former New York Times reporter and a Secluded in the hills of Topanga founder of literary “new journalism,” Canyon, just north of Los Angles, the chronicled the going-on at Sandstone Sandstone Retreat was a unique in his 1981 “sex-posee,” They experiment in erotic exploration. Neighbor’s Wife. “After descending Founded by John and Barbara the red-carpeted staircase,” he Williamson in 1969, it drew a fairly reported, “the visitor entered the wide and often distinguished following semidarkness of a large room where, among “free love” advocates, those reclining on the cushioned floor, exploring the vast -- yet limitedly bathed in the orange glow from the chartered -- territory of sexual fireplace, they saw shadowed faces intimacy.* Among retreat regulars and interlocked limbs, rounded breasts were the sexologists Alex Comfort and and reaching fingers, moving buttocks, Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, the glistening backs, shoulders, nipples, journalists Gay Talese navels, long blond hair and Max Learner, the spread across pillows, artist Betty Dodson, the thick dark arms holding performer Bobby Darin, soft white hips, a woman’s and Daniel Ellsberg, head hovering over an renown for leaking the erect penis.” His ears Pentagon Papers. were as observant as his According to one eyes: “Sighs, cries of estimate, its ecstasy could be heard, membership topped the slap and suction of 275 couples.2 copulating flesh, laughter, murmuring, music from the stereo, Sandstone’s library and public grounds crackling black burning wood.” resonated with high-minded conversation among well-meaning, Talese goes on to detail the enticing intelligent and mostly white, middle- scene awaiting a visitor: class, suburban professionals. However, the legions of sexual As the visitor’s eyes adjusted to the light, adventurers and the curious who there was a clear view of the many shapes, visited the ranch were drawn by the sizes, textures, tones: Some couples sat crossed-legged in circles, relaxing talking, “free love” practiced in the basement as if picnicking on a beach; others embraced in many positions: women astride men, couples lying side by side, a * John Williamson insert; Facenfacts. Sex Matters Sandstone Ranch woman’s leg extended about her partner’s Maslow, B. F. Skinner, Robert Rimmer, shoulders, a man in missionary position and Winnie the Pooh.”* with elbows pressing into madras pillows, perspiration dripping from a dripping chin. These communes were organized to Nearby, a woman held her breath, gasping address a variety of social and spiritual as the man inside her began to come; then another woman, responding to the sound, concerns, but while many functioned arched her body and moved more quickly without an explicit sexual agenda, into her own orgasm, her skin flushed, her sexual exploration and face grimacing, her toes clenched. experimentation on an informal basis was not uncommon. Perhaps the most There were triads, foursomes, a few noted example of this kind of bisexuals; bodies that would belong to community was the Esalen Institute high-fashion models, line-academicians; located in Big Sur, south of San tattooed arms, peach beads, ankle Francisco. It served as a “living bracelets, ankhs, thin gold chains around laboratory” to further the development waists, hefty penises, noodles, curly female pubes, fine, bushy, trimmed, dark, of new psycho-therapeutic methods, blond, red valentines. … including massage, body therapy, nude “encounter” groups and – as ”It was,” Talese chuckles, “a room with practiced by one of the psychiatrist a view like none other in America, an Fritz Perls – sex between a therapist 4 audiovisual aphrodisiac, a tableau and his patient(s). These venues vivant by Hieronymus Bosch.”3 placed the emancipation of sexual experience at the center of the quest Sandstone may have been the most for new ways to live a fuller life, one well known of the intentional outside the conventions of traditional communities that flourished during the experience. tumultuous 1960s-1970s period, but it was not alone. Other communes The ‘60s counterculture, with its included secular groups like the Sheep appeal of sex, drugs and rock-&-roll, Ridge Ranch (aka Wheeler's Ranch), provoked all kinds of sexual Hog Farm, Total Loss Farm, Drop City, experimentation. Hippies and other Black Bear Ranch, Trans-Love free spirits from San Francisco’s Energies, Morning Star Ranch, New Haight-Ashbury to New York’s East Buffalo and Libre. They also included Village explored alternative lifestyles, religious communes like the including communal living, group Brotherhood of the Spirit, Shiloh, marriages and “free love” 5 Jesus People USA and Divine Light arrangements. The experimentation Mission. Talase sites a New York within most communes appears to Times survey that claimed that there have adhered to fairly conventional were nearly 2,000 “alternative lifestyle patriarchal, heterosexual sexual communities” in the U.S. during the counter-culture era. He notes that * Wilhelm Reich was a German-born these social experiments were “… of psychoanalyst, author and discoverer of various sizes and distinction, located in the “orgone” life force; he was arrested farmhouses and city lofts, hillside and imprisoned by the US FDA for his manors and desert adobes, geodesic experimental cancer research and died in a domes and ghetto tenements….” federal penitentiary in 1957. Abraham Participants included “hippie Maslow was a psychologist and formulated horticulturists, mediating mystics, theory of “hierarchy of needs.” B. F. Skinner was a Harvard psychologist and swingers, Jesus freaks, ecological author of the “utopian” study, Walden Two. evangelists, retired rock musicians, Robert Rimmer was the author of The tired peace marchers, corporate Harrad Experiment that advocated for dropouts, and devotees of Reich and utopian, group marriage. © David Rosen, 2016 page 2 Sex Matters Sandstone Ranch practices. It appears to have been the divisions that defined other principally male directed, progressive moments of the era, the heterosexually oriented, with limited civil rights, anti-war and women’s sex-play (e.g., fetishes, role playing) movements. With regard to sexuality, and the mixing of people of different the division was between a more backgrounds (e.g., race, class, sexual mainstream, middle-class ethos orientation). Nevertheless, three- promoting male-oriented notions of somes involving one man and two pleasure and those identified as more women were not uncommon radical, if not “perverted,” whether explorations. Still others within the identified as homosexual, hedonistic or counter culture were open to wider pan-sexual. It was a division between experiences. “When you start getting those enforcing reformist free in your lifestyle, it’s hard to accommodation to existing social regress and go backwards,” a teenage power and those championing a more girl describes her experience with systematic critique of patriarchy and “free-love” during the ‘60s. “What got homophobia. This struggle was played me into the lesbian trip is I hung out out in a variety of different sexual with hippie types, smoked pot, worked activities including at private parties, in the anti-war movement, rebelled in swap clubs, swing clubs, gay s/m clubs every way I could think of.” She then and a variety of anonymous sexual admits, “I slept with most of the men hook-ups. It is a struggle that in my group. Then there were two continues into the 21st century. women in the group who had three- ways with men. I thought that Swap sounded interesting. I was open to experience as a way of living.”6 In 1964, William and Jerrye Breedlove published Swap Clubs: A study in The sexual revolution of the 1960s- Contemporary Sexual Mores. 1970s was the nation’s third major According to the book’s “bio,” the challenge to deeply rooted traditional couple had been married for 12 years Christian moral order. The earlier and he was a 30-year-old engineer revolutions include the utopian and she was 29-year-old librarian; movements of the 1840s-1870s and they had four children and lived in the cultural revolution of the 1910s- Southern California. Their study is 1920s.7 The ‘60s counterculture was a based on a series of first-person multigenerational effort, involving interviews and -- although unstated -- adults and young people, both high participatory observation.* If one school and college students. It accepts their findings, the sexual promoted a significant expansion in environment of the ‘60s was in the the forms of acceptable sexual midst of a much more profound expression and experience. The exploration process than is usually sexual revolution occurred during a recognized. Extrapolating from the period in which nearly all forms of alleged findings of Alfred Kinsey’s social authority were challenged, Institute for Sexual Research at including race relations, foreign Indiana University, the authors found military policy, dress codes and “that there are approximately five musical tastes. The outcome of this million married couples in the U.S. struggle forever changed the nature of who have exchanged partners with America’s its moral order, especially its sexual culture. * This is a non-scholarly study with no discussion of methodology; thus, it is The ‘60s sexual revolution was marked impossible to know if this is a work of by an internal schism that mirrored fiction or really based on primary research. © David Rosen, 2016 page 3 Sex Matters Sandstone Ranch another married couple for sexual homosexuals each have clubs of their intercourse at least once during their own, of course … .”11 marriage. Other authorities have estimated anywhere from a half- The study is invaluable with regard to million to three million.”8 the swap groups the Breedloves discovered operating throughout the Whatever the actual number, the country.
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