A slogan with several meanings
“Free love” was one of the most repeated phrases about the San Francisco hippies, and also one of the most misunderstood. To outsiders it usually meant casual sex without limits. To many people in the scene it meant something broader and vaguer: freedom from the sexual rules of the 1950s, openness about desire and bodies, and a hope that relationships could be based on affection and honesty instead of marriage and property. The reality in 1967 was a mixture of these ideas, ordinary behaviour and some real harm, and the evidence for it comes largely from memoirs, interviews and press reports, which should be read with care.
The phrase itself was not new. Writers and small communities had used “free love” since the nineteenth century to argue for relationships outside legal marriage. The Haight inherited the language along with the tradition of bohemian life seen in Beat Generation roots, and it came to the 1960s with a new technical support: oral contraceptives had been approved in the United States in 1960, which made it easier for many women to separate sex from pregnancy.
The ideas
Several strands fed into the 1967 attitude:
- A reaction against the postwar emphasis on marriage, suburban family life and respectability.
- A belief in psychedelic experimentation as a way to dissolve inhibitions and increase empathy.
- Interest in Eastern and mystical traditions, which some participants linked to non-possessive love.
- A critique of consumer society, which extended to treating people as property.
Poems, songs and underground newspapers spread these ideas. The Haight’s newspapers carried advertisements and essays that treated sexuality as natural and healthy, and some groups held public events that deliberately challenged conventions about nudity and display.
Communal living
Large Victorian houses made communal living practical, and a typical household might include a dozen or more people sharing rent, food and chores. Some houses were closely organised around a shared idea or a band. Others were crash pads where people slept for a night or a few weeks. Sexual relationships inside such houses ran across a range: couples who stayed together, short-lived affairs, group arrangements, and many residents who lived chastely.
It would be wrong to assume that everyone practised what the slogan implied. Many accounts suggest that most hippies, like most people, formed fairly conventional pairs, and that some of the loudest claims about sexual freedom came from the press and from visitors. A hippie lifestyle was often defined more by dress, music and drugs than by sexual behaviour.
Where practice fell short
Even among believers, the ideal ran into limits. Jealousy was common, and communal arrangements often broke down over it. Responsibility for children and for housework was not evenly shared. Many women in the Haight reported, then and later, that the supposedly liberated men around them expected them to cook, clean and be sexually available, in ways that echoed older roles. The movement’s rhetoric of equality did not change these habits quickly, and several women who later became active in the feminist movement have described the hippie scene as an early lesson in its limits.
Another problem was the growing number of very young runaways. Teenagers who left home often had no money, no support and little protection, and they could be pressured or exploited by older people. Reports of sexual assault in the district circulated during the summer, and the scale is difficult to measure because victims often did not go to the police. Some of those reports came from social workers and clinic staff, and they are among the reasons that later histories treat the idealised picture with scepticism.
Health consequences
Public health officials and volunteers noticed a rise in sexually transmitted infections during the summer, and treating them became a regular part of the work done at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which opened in June 1967. Precise statistics from that period are hard to come by, so it is safer to say that venereal disease was a recognised and growing concern than to quote specific numbers. Hepatitis and other illnesses linked to overcrowding and shared needles raised parallel worries. The antibiotics of the time could treat many infections, but a lack of information and reluctance to seek care often delayed treatment.
Assessing the legacy
Historians generally describe the sexual culture of the Haight as one part of a broader change in American attitudes during the 1960s, sometimes called the sexual revolution, rather than a single movement with a clear programme. Some of its ideas, such as openness about sexuality and scepticism about rigid roles, lasted. Others, such as casual sex as a political act, faded quickly as the costs became clear. For a careful reader, the most useful point is that “free love” was a slogan with different meanings for different people in 1967, and was more often a topic for talk than a daily practice.