Chapter 2
Personal Heaviness:
Defining and Defending Countercultural Masculinity in the Haight-Ashbury
Free form means no rules to rely on, means man to man confrontation and the only consideration is personal heaviness.
—"Twisted" (an unidentified Digger)
The Diggers and the Postwar "Crisis of Masculinity"
1The Diggers, like all their American contemporaries, were heirs to a conflict over the place of white women in the authority structure of American society that first took shape, according to historian Lori D. Ginzberg, in the decades after the American Revolution. It was at that time, she argues, that white women of the nascent middle class laid claim to a public identity as moral reformers, based on the moral purity that presumptively distinguished all women from worldly, self-interested men. During the years when radical abolitionists distanced themselves from what they saw as corrupt institutions and embraced moral suasion as the means to the transformation of a society that derived wealth from the exploitation of the poor and the enslaved, some evangelical women capitalized on that sense of women's moral superiority and solidarity to bring forward proposals for a sweeping transformation of the social order through direct confrontation of the immorality of men of all classes, including their own. This vision of the purification of American society through women's moral uplift of men, says Ginzberg, quickly ran afoul of its limitations: when women activists accused men of their own class of moral improprieties, such as the exploitation of prostitutes, the accused turned the tables, questioning the moral purity of women who would dare discuss such indecencies in public. The male leadership of the abolition movement weathered this storm. In the 1850s, as they recognized not only the risks to their own reputations engendered by strict adherence to moral suasion, but also its practical limitations as a strategy for social change, they developed a renewed interest in party politics as a means of access to state power. After the Civil War, with the expansion of the state's involvement in charitable and social-welfare endeavors, the conflation of women's difference and morality served the much narrower interests of the newly dominant white middle class. Benevolent women, now isolated as a professional elite in male-controlled institutions of social welfare, helped defend the hegemony of the middle class through regulation of the poor and through maintaining the marginalization of people of color.1
2This story might seem far removed from hippies' efforts to create a new social order. But as Ginzberg points out, the nineteenth-century conflation of arguments about women's inherent morality with arguments about women's sameness as and difference from men formed an enduring legacy of the mystification of gender relations—one that only deepened as science usurped the social authority of religion. Reading between the lines of Ginzberg's assessment of the historical significance of this nineteenth-century conflation, it becomes clear that Freudianism, behaviorism, and sexual science appropriated and restated, rather than problematizing, evangelical Protestantism's conflation of moral and gender ideologies, and handed them on, unresolved.2
3That this complex of ideologies was a conflation meant that it had to be renegotiated in every generation. In the post-World War Two United States, a new generation of experts and pundits debated women's place in society and the "battle of the sexes." At one extreme, some authorities, like Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, decried the "masculinization" of women, and mothers' neglect of children during the war, urging a return to feminine domesticity. At the other extreme, Philip Wylie warned that the nation's mothers were smothering their children with attention. Such extremes created openings for "reasonable" voices to prevail, conceding the legitimacy of women's desire for paid employment while framing that desire as in no sense an abandonment of their primal instinct to nurture. The mothers of the baby boom, in Ginzberg's words, had "inherited, not resolved" the "century-long debate over gender difference and sameness, as well as the relationship of those ideologies to charity, social change, and class."3
4Less often remembered today is that this ongoing attempt to finesse women's difference from and sameness with men involved hand-wringing over a seemingly unheralded "crisis" of bourgeois masculinity. The strident extremes of the postwar dialogue represented not simply denunciations of women's willfulness, but also a defense of the husbands and sons who were its purported victims. Farnham's and Wylie's vociferous, if conflicting appeals for a return to difference afforded Arthur Schlesinger Jr. an opportunity to plead for the reasonableness of sex-role adjustments premised on a more expansive view of the traits common to both sexes. In an opinion piece for Esquire in 1958, the eminent historian conceded that yes, "the roles of male and female are increasingly merged in the American household," and the bastions of public male exclusivity had been falling, one by one, since late in the previous century. But, he said, the bearers of extreme views had clearly overstated their respective cases; Schlesinger chided both Farnham and Wylie, retorting that "the implications of the argument that the American man has been unmanned by the emancipation of the American woman is that the American man was incapable of growing up." Rather than sending Mom back to the home, or restoring husbands to their former status as pater familias, the way for "men to become men again," he argued, was to cultivate their individuality within the (purportedly) egalitarian family by developing their intellectual and artistic sensibilities.4
5 The Diggers' invention of an "outlaw" variant of countercultural manhood in the 1960s constituted a new dimension of this postwar dialogue of crisis. Rather few white men of their fathers' generation, and perhaps even fewer men of color, had taken the urbane Schlesinger's advice. For most, military service had been a defining moment of collective masculine identity formation—and one reinforced by the upward mobility and the deep commitment to breadwinning and householder status that characterized so many white men's postwar lives.5 In their efforts to promote an anarchist vision of countercultural radicalism, the Diggers distanced themselves sharply from their fathers' military manliness. They proclaimed long hair as a symbol of hip virility, rejected the older generation's equation of masculinity with whiteness and suburban respectability, and created an impudent theater of the streets that denied the legitimacy of the state's regulation of conduct in public places. What emasculated the American man, they argued, was not so much Wylie's "Momism" (although the Diggers claimed that mothers played the part, as we will see, of "avatars of Delilah"), but the myriad forms of deference to hierarchical authority induced by loyalty to the institution of private property.
6As they distinguished themselves from straight men, the Diggers also marked the differences between themselves and other hippies. They staked a claim to leadership in the counterculture based partly on what they saw as the contrast between their outlaw virility and the effeminacy of the mystically inclined. The Digger anarchists and pacifist mystics prosecuted this sharp rivalry within implicit limits, but it profoundly shaped social relations within the enclave from 1966 to 1968.
^topDefying Their Fathers: Digger Opposition to Straight Manhood
7Digger men defined their differences from the generation of their fathers along multiple dimensions. When it came to the cultural politics of appearance, they shared a stance with other hippie men. For example, the Diggers defended the "freak flag"—long hair—with the same vigor (though not always the same tactics) as did other hip men. Harassment of long-haired men quickly became a ritual of straight male bonding. Reporter Clay Geerdes recorded one such incident in May 1969:
I recall a Be-in in Fresno at Roeding Park one Sunday afternoon. I was sitting near a group of young farm boys, all crewcut, a few wearing cowboy shirts and levis, engraved boots, and all drinking beer. A young man with shoulder-length hair walked by. "Hey lookadat. Isn't she cute? Hey, little girl, does yore mama know you're out?" Lots of laughs. The young man went on his way, paying no attention, on his own trip. One of the cowboys called out after him: "Hey, honey, how about gettin' in ya?" For the cowboys, longhair meant femininity and nothing else.6
8Hippie men responded to such challenges to their manliness in a variety of ways. Mystically oriented hippies usually responded with the same studied indifference practiced by the man in the vignette. In their writings, they took an almost purely Rousseauvian approach, defending their "natural" appearance as truly superior in terms evocative of the Noble Savage, whose return would mark the collapse of an unnatural way of life. "Clearly," wrote Geerdes, "the Tac[tical Squad] cop with his baton is the modern counterpart of the bone-wielding killer ape, while the longhaired hippy represents
9While the Diggers concurred that the long-haired man pointed the way to the future, they did not imagine him a pacifist. Instead, he resembled the Native American warriors, Hell's Angels, Western gunslingers, and Black Panthers who defended their liberty with force when necessary. The Diggers impugned the manhood of their opponents with the same relish with which the "cowboys" in Roeding Park labeled as effeminate the man with long hair:
ARE THE MOTHERS OF AMERICA AVATARS OF DELILAH?
HAS THE BARBER'S UNION INFILTRATED THE ENTIRE SOCIETY?
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HAIR?
DURING MOST OF RECORDED HISTORY MEN HAVE WORN THEIR
HAIR BELOW THE COLLAR.. . .
NOW THAT THE TREND HAS SHIFTED BACK TOWARD A MORE
NATURAL GROWTH, THOSE PREFERRING CLIPPERS TO TRESSES
HAVE REACTED WITH
THE SORT OF RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION ONE COULD EXPECT IF
THEIR OWN BALLS
HAD BEEN THREATENED.
Why, the Diggers asked, with tongues planted firmly in cheek, did the World War Two generation react with such panic? They charged that straight men suffered from jealousy of hippies' more robust sexual life and freedom from the cares of the striving individual, of which long hair served as an unwelcome reminder. They advised fellow freaks not to "get bugged—just be beautiful. And long may it wave!"8
10 Confrontations with the police served as another means by which the Diggers distinguished their manliness from that of their fathers' generation. In the many happenings they staged in the Haight-Ashbury, the Diggers pursued a strategy of drawing unwitting police officers into their guerrilla-theater productions. They attempted to use the police as foils against which their anarchism would stand in sharp contrast.
11The police frequently obliged. Sometimes, as in the Full Moon Celebration of Halloween, discussed in the previous chapter, they publicly confirmed Digger accusations of repressive heavy-handedness. In 1967, the group issued a handbill that advised hippies on how to interact with the police. "If, during this or any future love feast, The Man chooses to assert his balls, pay for his leather & shit on The Constitution by busting you, these simple rules will make the experience more entertaining for you & more educational for him." Borrowing from the Gandhian techniques of civil-rights and antiwar protesters, they recommended that free men should neither resist nor cooperate with police during arrests. Rather, hippies should "GO LIMP!!!!! If he really wants you, let The Man carry you
12While carefully chosen confrontations could further their political aims, Digger men's expertise in reading the manly behavior of straight opponents helped them to avoid conflicts that they could not win. In late June 1967, Berg, Grogan, Fritsch, and Murcott decided to travel to Denton, Michigan to attend—and disrupt—a meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society. They rented a car using a stolen credit card. On the way, they stopped in a bar in Kalamazoo for food. The bar's exterior fooled them: once inside, they unexpectedly found themselves surrounded by a hundred burly steelworkers celebrating the end of the work-week. The room fell silent when the four Diggers crossed the room to the bar. As the longhairs ordered food and drinks, the steelworkers began to stir and whisper; comments about "beatniks and hippies" hung in the air, although, according to Grogan, "never loud enough to become a challenge." The situation seemed manageable: the hippies' disciplined silence and avoidance of eye contact with all but the bartender (to whom Grogan had flashed a twenty-dollar bill, signaling that payment was certain) had kept the simmering workers from erupting. Then, Berg, "for some singular, absurd, irrational reason of his own," took a pool cue from a rack and returned to his barstool. The working-class Grogan, who had spent time in bars and prisons, glowered at his companion, worried that the steelworkers would interpret this as a defensive posture. Many of the workers simply saw it as absurd: a roar of laughter swept through the room. But Grogan noticed that some were not laughing—and one, a bit drunk—approached "to see whether [Berg] wanted to play out the move he'd just made."10
13Before Berg could respond to the man's slurred challenge, Grogan slipped in front of his brother, and politely announced that he, not the diminutive Berg, was going to play a game. The drunken man, liking his odds less when faced with a more formidable opponent, sauntered back to his chair. Luckily for the group, a younger, nonbelligerent man accepted Grogan's challenge. Grogan took care to rack the balls "using only his forearms and hands to shape them together," signaling to his audience that he "knew what to do with a pool table." Shooting first, he sank several shots quickly to establish his skill; then, he deliberately missed an easy shot, allowing the other man to take over and win the game on his home turf. Grogan shook the man's hand, paid his lost bet, bought the victor a drink, and rejoined his companions at the bar. His deference to the locals paid off: the four Diggers emerged from the bar unscathed.11
14The Diggers' efforts to distinguish themselves from the generation of their fathers involved the mobilization of both material and cognitive resources. As we saw in the previous chapter, their network of free stores and free food distribution constituted the germ of an anarchistic economy. As the symbol of this underground economy, they created the "1% Free" poster described in the introduction. The Diggers' use of the slogan in the poster fixed the archetypal form of hip manhood from a Digger perspective: socially marginal, dangerous, dedicated to evading modern time-disciplined work and professional success, and free from bourgeois family responsibilities.12
^topThe Repudiation of Whiteness
"White Negro" Anarchists
15 From the Diggers' perspective, the typical white bourgeois couple—the husband playing the role of the emasculated Samson, short haired and stripped of his strength, and the wife an emasculating avatar of Delilah—hid behind the truncheons of the police for fear of the virility of marginalized men. Bourgeois men particularly feared what the Diggers valorized as the self-confident masculinity of African Americans. Like Norman Mailer before them, the Diggers believed that black men had survived the harshness of white supremacy by preserving a more authentic and "primitive" form of manhood. Certainly, the rhetorical and sartorial style cultivated by the Black Panthers provided dramatic reinforcement of the anarchist hippies' viewpoint. Thus, one dimension of the latter's efforts to distinguish themselves from the generation of their fathers entailed the repudiation of their own white identity. Their first handbill, "World Pure," argued that the police harassed hippies and blacks to suppress the freedom of each.13
16Peter Coyote made this linkage with particular clarity in 1968. Adopting the pseudonym "William Bonney" (in an admiring reference to the gunslinger Billy the Kid), he related an incident at one of the Free City Collective happenings in front of city hall. A judge, passing by the gathering of freaks on his way to the courthouse, ordered one of them, Ron Thelin (formerly a co-owner of the Psychedelic Shop) to remove the mask he was wearing. When Thelin ignored him, the judge directed a police officer to arrest him under an obscure ordinance. To Coyote and his fellows, this crude exercise of authority amounted to an assault on Thelin's masculinity—and one with racialized roots:
There's [Thelin] looking all happy and real and the cops are pulling off his mask like they were pulling down his pants, and they're searching him in front of all those people, and. . . doing their best to humiliate him and why? It's about manhood and it's about lameness. America kills black manhood by making black men slaves. She kills white manhood by turning pale brothers into "white men." The lames kill their own manhood doing things no man would do and pretending they HAVE to [do so] because they're afraid to take care of themselves. So one dude does something he wants to, WHEN he wants to and everybody goes crazy, and gives the cops the go-ahead to get what scares them the most: manhood, dignity, independence.14
It was this perspective on the interrelation of race, manliness, and citizenship that, earlier, had led the Diggers to embrace Beat poet Gary Snyder's call to "kill the white man, / the 'American'" within.15
17The Diggers were not the only white youths drawn to black manhood. Historian Alice Echols has argued that "white rock 'n' rollers" had, in the 1950s, "revolt[ed] against domesticated masculinity." She suggests that exposure to this putatively transgressive music had led many budding Euro-American radicals "to identify with black men, whom they perceived as
18Where Echols finds the glass half full, I find it more than half empty. The Diggers' racialized understanding of masculinity makes better sense when placed in the historical context of the Euro-American tradition of bohemian romanticization of African-American manliness. That tradition had clearly taken shape by the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Historian David Levering Lewis observes of white seekers who went "slumming" in black neighborhoods that
Some. . . were drawn to Harlem on the way to Paris because it seemed to answer a need for personal nourishment and to confirm their vision of cultural salvation coming from the margins of civilization. Some expected the great renewal in the form of a political revolution and. . . anticipated that the Afro-American would somehow play a major role in destroying the old order. For others, the new religion of Freudianism, with its sexual trapdoor under the ordered mind, transformed the Afro-American's perceived lack of cultural assimilation from a liability into a state of grace.17
19As numerous historians have shown, this valorization by whites of the black "primitive" arose alongside, and partly in response to, the hegemonic white image of the black man as the incorrigible sexual predator. White supremacists proclaimed him a threat to white womanhood, and then responded with lynching and the imposition of rigid segregation in the South, and with police surveillance, ghettoization, and antimiscegenation laws elsewhere in the United States. In turn, this postbellum reorganization of race relations figured prominently in the turn-of-the-century cultural ferment surrounding the meaning of white, bourgeois manhood that Gail Bederman has termed the "discourse on civilization."18
20
The fantasy of the 1920s sophisticates, that cultural salvation would spring from the margins, grew out of the ferment Bederman describes and stood as a temporally specific manifestation of modern bohemians' faith in derepression. This faith was passed down to the Diggers through the Beats. As historian Erica Doss has shown, in the 1960s the Black Panther leadership, heirs no less to this legacy than the Diggers, drew on it to create "an image of masculine aggression and streetwise militance in their dress, art, and political culture.
21Although the Diggers' valorization of black manhood partook uncritically in this tradition, they, unlike the sophisticates who idealized black men from a safe distance, forged a working alliance with the Panther firebrands. David Hilliard remembers Emmett Grogan's deliveries of free food to the Panther headquarters in positive terms: "Groggan [sic] sticks his head in the office.
22From their position in the countercultural vanguard, earned through their publications, street theater, and close association with other Haight-Ashbury "heavies," the Diggers encouraged a more thoroughgoing rejection of white identity on the part of the "masses" of the enclave, excoriating them for failing to confront their own racism. Exclaiming that the "HAIGHT/ASHBURY IS THE FIRST SEGREGATED BOHEMIA I'VE EVER SEEN!" Chester Anderson of the Communication Company (a collective that worked closely with the Diggers) reminded hippies of recent history, when Euro-American bohemians had found shelter and inspiration in enclaves of people of color.22
"So Much to Manhood": The Tribal Mystique
23In the process of repudiating whiteness, the Diggers drew not only on romantic notions of the black primitive, but also from received notions of the Native American warrior as Noble Savage. They were not the only Hashburians to do so. Almost from the enclave's beginning, Stuart Brand's multimedia presentation, "America Needs Indians," had offered images of Native Americans as repositories of the tribal wisdom that could relieve white America's soul-numbing alienation. Books on Native American spirituality, such as Black Elk Speaks, sold well at the Psychedelic Shop, and freaks appropriated fringe, feathers, headbands, moccasins, the sweat lodge, and tipis for the countercultural toolkit. Mystically inclined hippies, as we shall see in part 2, studied the peyote ceremony of the Native American Church in search of rituals that would reconnect the individual to the cosmos and the earth.23
24In his memoir, Grogan offered a fanciful account of his initiation into the mysteries of wilderness by a Native American man, interesting mostly for its invocation of the Turnerian formula of wilderness as the touchstone of authentic manhood, and, thus, the salvation of human freedom. He claims to have met Little Bird in the latter part of April 1967, in Bill Fritsch's apartment. The twenty-five year old Pueblo man, who "thoroughly maintained his Indianness," studied Grogan intently as the two shared a can of malt liquor. (We can wonder, today, why Grogan saw this particular detail as significant enough to mention.) As Grogan would have it, a mere half-hour later, the Pueblo invited him to his cabin in northern New Mexico. Grogan surmised that this was because he, the hardnosed New Yorker, "had the look of a man who could learn what every man needs to learn about himself and what every Indian
25 Little Bird outfitted the penniless hippie with a bow, a small-caliber rifle, camouflage gear that would allow him to move through the woods unobserved, and deer musk that would mask his scent to game animals. The Pueblo's instruction, says Grogan, consisted mostly of wordless modeling of technique during day-long treks. This approach required a Zen-like concentration on the present moment. Close proximity to animals, in "unspoiled" wilderness (his word), fostered in the urban-dweller a sense of connection to the land that had eluded him in previous sojourns in the countryside. Little Bird's invitation had not explicitly included an offer to teach, and the anarchist had not come with the intent to study. The question of what had drawn him into this quest—which Grogan's narrative consistently frames as a rite of passage—accompanied him during the long afternoons. Spotting a "magnificent stag," Grogan intuited that the animal might well hold the answer to his question. Standing alone outside the cabin at the end of the day, he wondered when the moment of initiation might come; the sense of its nearness prompted a mixture of excitement and anxiety "that there was so much to manhood and being a man."25
26During the first ten days of silent instruction, teacher and student killed nothing; only when their food supplies ran low did they stalk game with genuine intent. One part of Grogan's repudiation of whiteness was to acquire a new perspective on the purpose of the hunt, taking only the game needed, rather than hunting for the sport of overpowering the quarry. That this perspective came to him through the silent tutelage of a Native American invokes a tacit opposition between his new perspective and the back-slapping camaraderie of the stereotypical brightly dressed, heavily armed, beer-guzzling sportsman Grogan might have become. His friend Murcott sketched this inauthentic masculine image in a handbill that appeared sometime in 1967 and was later incorporated into the longer "Mutants Commune":
You can stick a gun in his hands, and fulfill the IMAGE of a man.
You can stick a girl in his arms, and fulfill the IMAGE of a lover.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .And you can give him a house, a job, radios, cars,. . . and fulfillthe image of being affluent
The only thing that will make him free . . . is knowing that he can
Thus, one route to Digger free was to purge the inauthentic, white image of a man through tutelage by an Indian in the wilderness. The first step toward success in this effort came through a successful hunt for rabbit meat. Grogan noticed that, as Little Bird carefully examined their kill for disease, he entered a trance state, marked by trembling limbs, perspiration, and facial contortion. At first, the New Yorker thought that his teacher's excitement was a response to achievement; but, recalling the words of a hunting song Little Bird had taught him, he realized that he was witnessing what LSD users called "ego death": the target of the hunter's weapon is not the other, but rather his own unenlightened self. Ego death cleared the way for the hunter's union with the land and its creatures.27
27This realization, and further practice with small game, prepared Little Bird's student for his final test: a solitary journey into the hills for the magnificent stag he had spotted earlier in their travels, a strong, courageous creature with whom he had come to identify. Grogan plotted his approach in order to achieve "the cleanest of kills," such that the animal would experience no terror. That achieved, he loaded the animal on his back for the long return journey to the cabin. Little Bird inspected Grogan's work, speaking but one word: "Good." As if on cue, Grogan's narrative has Riffia and Cease emerge from the cabin to place a ritual offering of food next to the fallen buck. "They, too," writes Grogan, felt pride in his accomplishment, "for he was now a hunter—which was what his being there was all about."28
28We can certainly call any number of details of this story into question, not the least of which is Grogan's timeline. He claims to have spent a month in the cabin with Little Bird. Yet he had returned to San Francisco from New York City on 9 April, organized a free concert in Golden Gate Park, composed and published a com/co handbill on 20 April, and, on the way back to San Francisco, spent part of 29 April at a meeting in Santa Fe, at which he argued against the Thelins' plan to hold another Be-In in the Grand Canyon. He returned to the Haight at about the same time as the gun-toting Black Panthers made their visit to the California legislature on 2 May.29
29Such skepticism about the details is important, but we should not forget historian Dominick Cavallo's observation that "what matters about Grogan's odyssey into the wilderness is not its status as history, but its role as mythology." For Cavallo, Grogan's account is a Leatherstocking tale of "retreat[ing] into the wilderness, and embrac[ing] the prospects for savagery, death, adventure, and freedom" that such a journey offered "as a means of transforming himself."30 We may take this useful formulation one step further by noting the nature of the transformation that Grogan represented for himself in this tale: the hunt became his Zen archery, the activity that taught him how to achieve the trance state, which reconnected him to the cosmos by extirpating his ego-laden white masculinity.31
30 Yet in the same way that the Diggers' identification with black manhood drew uncritically on longstanding bohemian traditions of the black primitive, so too did Grogan's lyrical rendering of Little Bird as the Pueblo who "thoroughly maintained" his Indian masculinity. In this case, Grogan drew on the long tradition that historian Philip Deloria has called "playing Indian," in which, at seemingly every turning point in the elaboration of American masculinity, white men have adopted a "tribal" identity in order to distance themselves from those elements of their European cultural heritage that impinged on their freedom to remake themselves in the New World. Later, in the early 1970s, the Free Families pressed much harder against the limits of this tradition than most other counterculturalists by developing ongoing relationships to living Indians—as they had, in 1967, pressed against the limits of the bohemian tradition of valorizing the black primitive. Even so, what remains absent in these later efforts is an articulation of the problematic nature of these white traditions thorough enough to call into question the notion that some group of "primitives" may have preserved the route to an earlier Garden of Eden. The myth offers hope to those caught up in a painful present; such myths die hard.32
31By proudly waving the "freak flag," staging showdowns with the police, and repudiating white identity, the Diggers won a sterling reputation among many in the Haight as masculine heavies worthy of admiration, emulation, and deference. The acclaim was certainly not universal, however. Their strategy of manly theatrical confrontation garnered criticism from mystics, and most notably, from members of the Haight Independent Proprietors (HIP)—especially since Digger manhood depended so heavily on disparaging comparisons to these elder statesmen's supposed passivity and impotence.
^topDigger Virility versus Flower-Child Pacifism
32Like virtually all Americans at the time, the Diggers assumed that power and leadership rightfully belonged to the most authentically masculine of men. Thus, one of their principle strategies for claiming leadership in the New Community consisted of imputing effeminacy to their rivals, and the heavies of HIP bore the brunt of Digger scorn. There were two sides to this dispute, however, and it will be helpful to understand this gendered conflict among hip men from the perspectives of both the Diggers and the mystics.
33The most dedicated "flower children" of Psychedelphia could not have disagreed more with the Diggers' cocky assertions of masculine superiority, primarily because they regarded the Buddhist "third way" of nonconfrontation—neither weak submission nor violent reaction—as the most authentic and reliable approach to social change. They regarded masculinity and femininity—yang and yin—as fundamental characteristics of the cosmic energy that generated and permeated the material plane of existence. What they rejected in the use of force was not masculinity per se, but rather the expression of the active principle, yang, in an egoistic way, not balanced by an equal regard for the principle of "feminine" receptivity. Unbalanced use of force, they warned, would create greater conflict and resistance, not harmony and change. Thus, for them, pacifism constituted not effeminacy, but a more evolved form of manliness.
34The mystical heavies of the HIP brought this perspective on manly detachment from violence to bear on the problems of Psychedelphia. As merchant-artists, they depended on street traffic for their livelihoods and recognized the seriousness of police brutality against hippies—they, too, numbered among those targeted. They encouraged hippies to avoid conflict; when avoidance was impossible, they recommended turning the other cheek, and the cultivation of mutual trust and respect between freaks and police.
35
Members of the Council for a Summer of Love, created and dominated by members of HIP, advised the influx of youths during the summer of 1967 to practice conflict avoidance. "Crowds on Haight Street make tricky leader-follower scenes," they warned. "When cops face a crowd of people
36More was at stake than relations between hippies and the police: the mystics cautioned that violent opposition carried negative karmic consequences for its practitioners. Poet Harry Monroe, a contributor to the Oracle, urged fellow hippies to become more mindful of the karmic consequences of baiting and hating the police. "I cannot see who would be a more obvious recipient of our love and joyousness than the very men who as police officers in the performance of their duties enter into a conflict with us and as such are cast in the role of our enemies. We who condone so much of our own behavior by allusive statements of love can have no enemies. Having them, we should be by our natures compelled to love our enemies." Monroe repeated a suggestion from Beat poet Allen Ginsberg that "the police
37The Diggers scoffed at such reasoning. But before presenting evidence on that point, I must introduce a necessary interpretive device: theologian, playwright, and gay-liberation activist John Stoltenberg's concept of the manhood act, which I will set within the framework of R. W. Connell's theoretical work on masculinity.
The Manhood Act
38Connell argues that in every particular network of gender relations, there emerges a "hegemonic masculinity" whose proponents impose "specific gender relations of dominance and subordination" among themselves and on other groups of men, as well as on women. Hegemonic groups in the developed world attribute to gay men "whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity," since "gayness is easily assimilated to femininity." One of the weapons in the ongoing struggle to maintain hegemony—or, for subordinate groups, relative advantage over other subordinate men—is "a rich vocabulary of abuse: wimp, milksop, nerd,
39Thus the accusation of effeminacy can carry profound consequences, and often motivates men to strenuous effort to avoid stigma. Inevitably, few of the men who relate to other men as hegemonically masculine actually meet the qualifications of a "real man" when the hegemonic form operates as a norm. According to Stoltenberg, this creates a crucial point of opportunity in the politics of gender among men, making virtually all men vulnerable to the charge that they are not really the men whom they claim to be, since anyone may, if they dare, point out the ways in which even a dominant man deviates from the supposed norm. This becomes progressively more likely as one proceeds toward the bottom of masculine hierarchies, especially for adolescents and young adults—the point in the life-cycle occupied by many of the men under study here. As ex-SDS leader Paul Potter observed of his own awkward transition from boyhood to manhood, "There is a period of time when the armor of [masculine] intellectual, physical, and moral superiority is being hammered together, when boys/men have yet to develop proficiency in maintaining the superior stance. It is this lack of ability that creates the vulnerability
40 Potter focused on how this vulnerability shaped relations between women and men, motivating men to develop "mastery of the discipline of manhood—the subjugation of womanhood."37 Stoltenberg devotes particular attention to the ways in which this vulnerability plays out among men as well. Observing that all men "are raised to pass tests of loyalty to manhood," Stoltenberg assigns the term manhood act to social transactions in which a man establishes his dominance by challenging another's claims to manhood.38 The other has to choose whether and how to respond. The most frequent response is to try to refute the challenge, thereby allaying suspicions of effeminacy.
41The most easily recognizable form of this transaction comes, says Stoltenberg, in a "moment of confrontation—when another man's threat rears up, when his opportunity to hurt or humiliate you becomes clear to you both." Confrontation is not the only way to administer the challenge—one may also test a man's loyalty to manhood by, for example, telling a joke that denigrates women or gays to see if the other laughs, or by sexually harassing another person in the other's presence to see if he will acquiesce or join in—as in the Tailhook scandal.39 However, face-to-face confrontation serves well as an illustration.40
42According to Stoltenberg, there are three possible outcomes to the manhood act. The first two seem obvious: "You lose
43Thus the manhood act that results in a truce is an instance of what both academics and popular writers have called "male bonding."42 As we will see in the next chapter, among the Diggers, the manhood act served to establish a semblance of rank (though one that depended on situational context, and therefore was not absolute) as men competed with one another for status within a formally anarchist, egalitarian group. The Diggers also found the manhood act useful in their competition for status and authority with the mystical hippies who comprised the HIP.
The Manhood Act as Digger Weapon
44The Diggers heaped scorn on the metaphysical preoccupations of the HIP heavies, calling their masculinity into question by disparaging the effeminacy of their newspaper, the Oracle, and the purported passivity of their politics. An unidentified Digger wrote a letter to the Oracle likening the newspaper to a menstrual pad, and asking whether the editors intended to continue to publish "misinformation, outdated 'news,' fey psychedelic bullshit art and premasticated verbal masturbation
45
For the Diggers, pacifist nonconfrontation conceded the dignity of the free man, which he could keep only if he actively defended his freedom against the incursions of unjust authority. Grogan claimed that he and Billy Murcott wrote the earliest of the Digger handbills in "reaction against the pansyness of the S. F. Oracle
46Another, and even earlier, example of Digger resort to the manhood act to express enmity toward the metaphysically inclined can be found in Grogan and Murcott's response to a suggestion floated by members of HIP, who proposed that hippies build bridges of human understanding with the police by taking cops to dinner. Grogan and Murcott exploded with sarcasm. Employing some of their most salacious imagery, they likened liberal capitalism's capacity to co-opt and absorb dissent to an enormous female sexual organ that rendered dissent impotent by engulfing the phallic rectitude of free men. Grogan and Murcott charged that, while the HIP publicly denounced straight society's suppression of dissent as "disgusting," their commitment to manly resistance proved wanting:
Degoutante45
said mickey
kissing the cops
to hedge the bet.
47"Mickey" was Michael Bowen. Then, as we saw in the previous chapter, Grogan and Murcott set forth a long list of examples showing that the proposal to befriend police over shared meals was no different than the bribery, graft, and favoritism that, according to the authors, characteristic of the police as an institution devoted to the defense of private property.
48The Diggers did not confine their use of the manhood act to the printed page. If we credit Grogan's account, he nearly struck Bowen at the end of September 1966, when he spied his rival ripping down Digger posters urging hippies to ignore the martial-law curfew imposed during the Hunter's Point conflagration. Grogan confronted him, yelling "What the fuck do you think you're doing[?] Huh[?]" Bowen responded mildly, saying, "We didn't mean anything. We just have a different way of dealing with the police," and invited Grogan and Murcott to the Oracle office for further discussion. Murcott restrained his furious comrade, who drew upon the vocabulary of insult described by Connell to taunt Bowen. "We already know your ingenious plan! You're gonna love 'em to death with fancy suppers 'n suffocate 'em with smoke from burning incense!" A free man would never resort to such effeminate wiles. "Well, we got our own way, see[?]" Sliding into the tone of the playground tough, Grogan completed his portrait of Bowen's flaccidity: "That curfew's for you! So, you better hurry home before the nasty policemens give you all a spankin'! 'N leave our signs alone!" Although, given the degree to which Grogan mixed fact with fiction in his memoir, we cannot be sure that these words were spoken, we can be sure that in 1972, as Grogan finalized his manuscript, this manhood act served as his representation of the heroic figure of the life-actor.46
49Many other examples of the Diggers' use of the manhood act could be cited, but the pattern is clear. In the days before radical feminism and gay liberation, hippies, like men in the New Left, competed for power with gendered weapons, absent the circumspection and constraint evident among some radical men in the following decade.47
^topThe Limits of Rivalry
50 The rivalry between the HIP and the Diggers continued throughout the Diggers' time in the Haight-Ashbury. Despite this, as noted in the previous chapter, the two groups did cooperate in limited ways. Clearly, cooperation in the face of outside hostility, and the looming prospect, in the spring of 1967, of thousands of youths descending on the small enclave, helped to limit rivalry between the two groups.
51Serious though it was, their sparring also functioned as a form of catharsis, relieving tensions that might otherwise have resulted in the collapse of the enclave. Historian Timothy R. Mahoney argues that the development of male subcultures in the markedly heterogeneous, rapidly growing towns of the Mississippi River basin before the Civil War defused class conflict among a transient population. The Haight-Ashbury enclave conceived of itself as a community reversing the urbanization, industrialization, centralization, and material "progress" that Mahoney's western communities had pursued a century earlier. Still, these latter-day pioneers lived in close quarters, and some of them carried pistols. They improvised the forms of social interaction in a community where social authority was relatively level, and faced some of the same problems as had their ancestors. Therefore, it seems reasonable to propose that for male hippies as well as male residents of the Iowa frontier, tensions expressed through the manhood act—counterbalanced, at times, by the restraining hands of men like Murcott—dissipated some of the emotional energy that might otherwise have found expression in internecine violence.48
52Rivalry-within-limits for the leadership of the counterculture shaped the Haight-Ashbury enclave in important ways. It pushed participants to articulate their perspectives on countercultural politics with greater clarity, and to accommodate their rivals when they could not be bested. Nevertheless, the manly competition among heavies, even if kept within implicitly defined limits, clearly exacted a cost as well. Peter Krug, owner of the handicrafts shop Wild Colors, told an unidentified interviewer that Grogan's behavior at the meaning to harmonize trips "wrecked the spirit" of the Haight-Ashbury "for good.
53If a commitment to the derepression of "natural" manhood served to organize the most committed cultural radicals of the Haight-Ashbury into competing factions, it also served as the ground on which Digger men could "find their brothers" and compete with them to establish their relative "personal heaviness." It also played a part in Digger men's relationships with the women of their group. The next chapter treats the role of outlaw hip manhood in shaping the internal dynamics of the Digger core group.
^topNotes:
Note 1: Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), 214–16. back
Note 2: Ibid., 214–20. back
Note 3: Joanne Meyerowitz, "Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958," in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1994), 230, 238–42; Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties (New York Univ. Press, 1996), 17–18; Ginzberg, Benevolence, 216. On the postwar debate more generally, see Jesse Isaac Berrett, "The Secret Lives of Consumer Culture: Masculinity and Consumption in Postwar America" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1996); Michael Kimmel, "'Temporary about Myself': White-Collar Conformists and Suburban Playboys, 1945–1960," chap. 7 in Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 223–58. back
Note 4: Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, rev. ed. (New York: Rinehart, 1955); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "The Crisis of American Masculinity," Esquire: The Magazine for Men 50, no. 5 (November 1958): 63–65. back
Note 5: In addition to the Berrett and Kimmel works cited in note 3 above, see Elaine Tyler May's discussion of postwar heterosexual couples' deep commitment to home ownership in "The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home," chap. 7 in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). back
Note 6: Clay Geerdes, "Is Long Hair a Psycho-Sexual Threat to the State? Female Liberation Freaks Cops," Los Angeles Free Press 6, no. 254 (30 May 1969): 40. back
Note 7: Ibid. back
Note 8: "Are the Mothers of America Avatars of Delilah?" Free City News handbill, n.d., HSDR, folder 6, MS3159, NBL-CHS. This item dates from sometime between the publication of the first issue of the Free City News, 29 September 1967, and the time when Nicholas von Hoffman finalized the manuscript for We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968); von Hoffman reproduces the handbill text in part at 140. back
Note 9: "Dig!" com/co handbill, 1 April 1967, box 25, folder 3, JLSP, BHL. back
Note 10: Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 385–88. Grogan leaves unexplained why none of the four were armed. In similar situations, even Digger men ranging far from home in borrowed vehicles carried weapons, as when Coyote and a Native American friend surprised a truckload of cowboys who were trying to run them off a highway by suddenly reversing direction at a turnout and training pistols on the "amazed shit-kickers," who fled in disarray (Sleeping, 188). back
Note 11: Grogan, Ringolevio, 388–89. back
Note 12: See the introduction, par. 14. back
Note 13: On the evolution of the Panther uniform, see Erika Doss, "Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s–1990s," Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 23 (1998): 483–516. Norman Mailer, The White Negro (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957). [Emmett Grogan], "Let Me Live in a World Pure," handbill, ca. 14–20 September 1966, Digger Archives, DP-003; document available online at http://www.diggers.org/bibscans/Dp003_m.jpg (accessed 9 January 2007); date and authorship assigned by Michael William Doyle, "The Haight-Ashbury Diggers and the Cultural Politics of Utopia, 1965–1968" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell Univ., 1997), 108 n. 104. back
Note 14: William Bonney [Peter Coyote], "Hey! Let Go My Coat," Barb (Berkeley, Calif.) 6, no. 19 (10–16 May [1968]): 6. For another Free City Collective discourse on race urging guerrilla "pales" and revolutionary "blacks" to recognize themselves as members of a category ("street") that transcended classifications of race, see [Peter Coyote], "Flower Power Smothers," San Francisco Express Times 1, no. 6 (29 February 1968): 8; authorship assigned by Doyle, "Diggers," 327 n. 298. back
Note 15: Gary Snyder, "A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon," Realist, no. 81 (August 1968): 2; previously issued as com/co handbill, ca. May 1967 (Doyle, "Diggers," attributes to Gary Snyder, 181, 473; date of handbill comes from 473). back
Note 16: Alice Echols, "'We Gotta Get Out of This Place': Notes toward a Remapping of the Sixties," Socialist Review 22, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 27. back
Note 17: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 99. See also Nathan Irvin Huggins, "Heart of Darkness," chap. 3 in Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), 84–136. The role of Freudianism in shaping the worldview of modern American bohemians has been widely remarked; less often acknowledged is the influence of behaviorism. For its influence on the pre–World War One bohemianism of the Greenwich Village cultural radicals of Heterodoxy, see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 155. back
Note 18: On the inception of de jure segregation in the South, the germinal work is C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955). Writing separately, Joel Williamson and Diane Miller Sommerville have established that the myth of the black rapist, while not unknown in the South before the Civil War, became a prominent feature of Southern race relations only in the late decades of the nineteenth century; see Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 111–34 passim, 306–10, and Sommerville, "The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered," Journal of Southern History 61, no. 3 (August 1995): 481–518. On lynching, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), 145–57. On antimiscegenation law, see Peggy Pascoe, "Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage," in Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 69–80. On the "discourse on civilization," see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995). back
Note 19: Doss, "Imaging the Panthers," 490 (quotation), 510; Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005). For a good overview of the evolution of black feminism, see Benita Roth, "The Vanguard Center: Intramovement Experience and the Emergence of Black Feminism," chap. 3 in Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004). back
Note 20: David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 158. On the Diggers' donation of printing services to the Panthers, support for the Black Man's Free Store, and free-food distribution, see the sources cited in chap. 1, n. 68. See also "The Black House Presents: Brother LeRoi Jones," com/co handbill, [10 April 1967], box 25, folder 3, JLSP, BHL. On the Ali-benefit "happening" in Hunter's Point, San Francisco, 11 June 1967, see Doyle, "Diggers," 200–201. back
Note 21: "Warning to So-Called 'Paper Panthers,'" notice, Black Panther: Black Community News Service 2, no. 6 (14 September 1968): 10; also published in the Haight-Ashbury Maverick 2, no. 2 [1968]: [12]. For an analysis of the Black Panthers' interest in alliances with countercultural groups, see Leerom Medovoi, "A Yippie-Panther Pipe Dream: Rethinking Sex, Race, and the Sexual Revolution," in Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, ed. Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), 133–78. back
Note 22: Chester Anderson, "Two Page Racial Rap," com/co handbill, 9 February 1967, HSDR, folder 3, MS 3159, NBL-CHS, [1–2]. On hippie racism, including some non-Diggers' efforts to confront it, see "Who All Lives in the Yellow Submarine?" The Movement (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, San Francisco) 3, no. 4 (April 1967): 2, 4; and von Hoffman, We Are the People, 108–9, 112–25. back
Note 23: See Perry, Haight-Ashbury, on America Needs Indians, 18–19, 46–47, and on the popularity of books on Native American spirituality, 257. See also America Needs Indians, "A Celebration of the Future," San Francisco Maverick, 1, no. 3 (ca. 21 June 1967): 8–9. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, As Told to John G. Neihardt (New York: William Morrow, 1932). For mystical hippies' attraction to the peyote ceremony and their understanding of the concept of tribe, see chap. 4, n. 30, below. back
Note 24: Grogan, Ringolevio, 366–67; Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt, 1921), 1–37; Dominick Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 128–39. back
Note 25: Grogan, Ringolevio, 368–69. back
Note 26: Free [Billy Murcott], untitled handbill, [1967], HSDR, folder 6, MS3159, NBL-CHS; date and authorship based on Doyle's assignment of same to "Mutants Commune," Barb 5, no. 7 (18 August 1967): 8–9, in "Diggers," 196 n. 180. back
Note 27: Grogan, Ringolevio, 369–72. back
Note 28: Ibid., 372–76. back
Note 29: Ibid., 374 (claim of one month), 362 (return from New York on second Sunday of April), 363–65 (free concert), 378–79 (date of return); Perry, Haight-Ashbury, 183 (date of X [signature mark], "about time we did our own livin' and dyin'," com/co handbill, CC-032, Digger Archives; document available online at http://web.archive.org/web/19980614193900/www.diggers.org/images/cc032_l.gif (accessed 9 January 2007); "Saturday—April 29—Santa Fe, N. Mexico," com/co handbill, 9 May 1967; box 1, folder 5, HC-SFPL (date of Santa Fe meeting). back
Note 30: Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past, 129. In a similar vein, Peter Coyote, in his introduction to the reprint edition of Grogan's Ringolevio (New York: Citadel Underground, 1990), urges readers not to "believe everything you read" in Grogan's memoir, "but don't be too quick to doubt, either.
Note 31: This metaphor alludes to Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, with a foreword by D. T. Suzuki, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1953). back
Note 32: Philip Deloria, "Counterculture Indians and the New Age," in Imagine Nation, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 159–88. On the Free Families' ongoing relations with Native American populations, see various essays in Don Monkerud, Malcolm Terence, and Susan Keese, eds., Free Land, Free Love: Tales of a Wilderness Commune (Aptos, Calif.: Black Bear Mining and Publishing, 2000), including passages at 98–100, 147, 162–88, and Coyote, Sleeping, 155–57, 170–72, 196–99, 229–32, and 253–61 passim. My thanks to Linda Xiques, editor, Pacific Sun (Mill Valley, Calif.), for help in locating Free Land. back
Note 33: Council for a Summer of Love in the City of San Francisco, "Emulate the Hobbits," handbill, 1967, HSDR, folder 6, MS3159, NBL-CHS. It is interesting to note that the hobbits adored by so many Hashburians were the main characters in novels that conjured a largely male fantasy world. William H. Green, "'Where's Mama?' The Construction of the Feminine in The Hobbit," The Lion and the Unicorn 22, no. 2 (1998): 188. back
Note 34: Eornom Yrrah [Harry Monroe], "A Dispersal Mantra for Hippies," San Francisco Oracle 1, no. 6 (14 February 1967): 13. back
Note 35: R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1995), 74–79 back
Note 36: Paul Potter, A Name for Ourselves: Feelings about Authentic Identity, Love, Intuitive Politics, Us (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 226. back
Note 37: Ibid. At that writing, Potter had drifted away from what remained of SDS and was living in an unidentified commune. back
Note 38: John Stoltenberg, The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience (New York: Dutton, 1993), 1. back
Note 39: Renee Goldsmith Kasinsky, "Tailhook and the Construction of Sexual Harassment in the Media: 'Rowdy Navy Boys' and Women Who Made a Difference," Violence against Women 4, no. 1 (February 1998): 81–99. In the Tailhook incident, a group of women naval officers suffered collective sexual assault and harassment by male counterparts attending a convention of naval aviators in Las Vegas, Nevada, in September 1991. The incident came to light after the female aide to an admiral attending the conference complained that men had formed a gauntlet in the corridor of the convention hotel, with the men ripping at her clothing and touching her genitals as she passed. The scandal serves as an example of the extremes that the manhood act can reach in the service of male bonding. back
Note 40: Stoltenberg, End of Manhood, 1. Note that neither Stoltenberg nor I suggest that this patterned response to challenge is the only one possible. Men can, and do, refuse the challenge for a multitude of reasons, ranging from a simple desire not to fight a particular battle, to a strong identification with women and/or gays, commitment to a particular system of moral belief, or even severe social ineptitude. In other words, loyalty to masculine identity is one loyalty within a complex system of individual and group loyalties, much as feminine or feminist consciousness figures as only one among several axes of female identity. On that point, see Nancy F. Cott, "What's in a Name? The Limits of 'Social Feminism'; or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women's History," Journal of American History 76 (December 1989): 826–28. Manhood act is useful as an analytical device for better understanding that complexity. back
Note 41: Stoltenberg, End of Manhood, 5. back
Note 42: The social-scientific literature on male bonding is extensive and varied. One particularly useful study is Timothy Jon Curry, "Fraternal Bonding in the Locker Room: A Profeminist Analysis of Talk about Competition and Women," Sociology of Sport Journal 8, no. 2 (June 1991): 119–35; particularly relevant to the discussion below of the homophobic hypermasculinity of Digger men is Brenda Gough and Gareth Edwards, "The Beer Talking: Four Lads, a Carry Out, and the Reproduction of Masculinities," Sociological Review 46, no. 3 (August 1998): 409–35. back
Note 43: A Digger, letter to the editor, San Francisco Oracle 1, no. 3 (November 1966): 15. My guess is that Grogan was the author. back
Note 44: Grogan, Ringolevio, 238. back
Note 45: Sic: dégoûtant, disgusting. back
Note 46: Grogan, Ringolevio, 242. back
Note 47: On the intense competitiveness of men in the New Left, see Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past, 67–73; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980); Marge Piercy, "The Grand Coolie Damn," in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970), 421–38. back
Note 48: Timothy R. Mahoney, "'A Common Band of Brotherhood': Migration, Male Subcultures, the Booster Ethos, and the Origins of the Urban Middle Class," chap. 3 in Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). back
Note 49: Quoted in Doyle, "Diggers," 179; citations do not clearly identify original source. For more on the meeting, and the perception of veiled threats, see chap. 1, par. 61. back