True Story: I Was A Hippie In San Francisco In The Sixties

Yes, hippies helped the cops bash gays. People might reject societal norms about bathing and working a 9-5 gig, but that doesn't make them "not assholes." There was a lot of anger and hate behind parts of the hippie movement. "You've probably heard of the Weather Underground, but they were more on the extreme side. But go down a few notches, and there were still a lot of hippies willing to destroy things to get their point across. Many of us were peaceful and were seen as harmless, but these kinds gave trouble. Some were communists, which in the '60s was pretty suspect. Others were antiwar, which meant half the country, including most of the police, were against you. Some others liked the lifestyle, but still wanted to see things explode."

Sam and his friends cooked huge communal meals, made art, and danced around in the sun listening to Janis Joplin. But while they were doing that, groups like the Weather Underground were orchestrating a two-decade bombing campaign.

It's likely that a lot of hallmarks of the hippie era were really nothing but jaded kids like Sam having a laugh. "There were some of us talking on a corner who would say, 'Bus is coming!' and we'd ... sit in a Hindu circle. We might pretend to do a rain dance. I remember we had a group of theater students on our block, and we put on a production of Measure For Measure, as if this sort of thing happened all the time."

If Sam and his friends played it up for the tourists, they might reinforce some silly stereotypes. But if they acted normal, they'd be gawked at like zoo attractions: "The bus would stop and people inside would stare at the hippies 'being normal.' My roommate at the time found out from the bus drivers that if we did stereotypical hippie behavior or if we approached the buses talking about love, tourists would get nervous and ask the drivers to floor it. Normal behavior was interesting, but things they had only heard about seemed dangerous. And that's why we kept it up: so that we wouldn't be stared at." Or at least, for not quite as long. You take what you can get.

Remember, this was the '60s. Even freaky fringe people were a hell of a lot more conservative than most normies today. "I know some hippie couples who didn't have sex before marriage. It was still seen as wrong by a lot of people then to have sex before you married, and that belief carried over to us. It wasn't odd to meet a hippie couple in the Haight who were engaged, but were waiting to have sex on their wedding night."

While the '60s saw more sexual liberation, reports showed that most relationships were still forms of monogamy. Assuming the tiny subset of hippies who truly boned freely were representative of the masses would be like people in 2100 assuming all Millennials were Juggalos.

"I would write and call my parents, and they would tell me all of these weird things they heard on the news about us, and 'everyone having sex with each other' was something they heard. But I needed to clarify for them that it simply wasn't happening, except for a few circles. It's like relationships today. It was a disappointment for new people. We'd have them in our apartment for a week, and a harsh truth they learned was that free love wasn't real." So a lot of hippies were boring ol' monogamous homophobes who played up the freak angle when cameras were rolling. But they were all still antiwar, right? After all, the most iconic and lasting symbol of the entire hippie movement is the peace symbol:

"Another group of us simply liked the clothes and the culture. I always point to the movie Serpico. You know, it's a New York cop, on the line and for the police, and he embraced the counterculture. There were weekend hippies, who would go downtown Monday through Friday, but 5 on Friday, they'd go full hippie. You could always tell who they were, because they had shorter hair. Before we knew about them, we thought they were cops."

Picture a hippie with a buzz cut. It just doesn't look right, does it?

In fact, a number of people were specifically turned off of drugs because of the subset of hippie users: "My first apartment there had rainbow-colored stairs, and we were bringing up a friend of mine from Iowa who came out here. He said he was excited to try acid when I picked him up from the bus station. When we reached my apartment, there were too many hippies, completely off their rockers on acid, staring at my stairs, reaching out. I don't remember exactly what they said, but I think it was, 'I can't grab the colors.' My friend, as soon as he got up, told me 'I'll try acid later.' He never did, and I'm 99 percent sure it was because of those hippies trying to grab the stairs six feet in front of them."

The summer of love attracted hundreds of thousands to San Francisco. Homelessness and malnutrition cases spiked. Even resident hippies started to go against the movement. Productive hippies who made art and hustled enough to feed themselves were swamped by freeloaders who didn't. "Then they would guilt us, saying it wouldn't give good karma, or how we could act 'like the rest of them'. Haight was like a big commune, but it needed people who had room for beds, and who could afford food. Take away that, and all you had left was artists or hippies who could only do small jobs, who couldn't afford to go anywhere else."

Everybody knows what that leads to: "We had our windows broken twice by 'peace-loving' hippies, because we refused to let any more stay the night. Streets were suddenly lined with hippies asking for change. In the parks and on the sidewalks, you used to see free spirits dancing around, or selling macrame hammocks, but now it was hippies who couldn't make it. Four years before it was Marijuana, and now it was heroin. After a while, they left, and it was empty yet again. That almost-utopia barely lasted a few years, man."

By 1971, the dream had died entirely. That was the year they filmed Dirty Harry, when we first realized that Clint Eastwood looks pretty good while blowing the hell out of bad guys in a grimy, crime-riddled American wasteland.

Some of that movie was shot a block away from Sam's house. "I asked some of the crew why they were shooting here, and they said, 'We needed a place that looked abandoned, without too many cars to disrupt filming.' And looking around, they were right."

Evan V. Symon is a journalist, writer and interview finder for Cracked. Have an awesome job/experience you'd like to see? Then hit us up at tips@cracked.com today!

Carol Blackman's book, Truth and Love: Finding the Soul of the Sixties, reveals even more about the idealized decade that you might not have known.

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