Perhaps not at heart but back in the day I was a hippie and for several years. Which was a lot more than just love and peace, not that there is anything wrong with those. Who is not for love and peace? Which indicates how basic and ordinary it all was. We wanted to live what we saw as simpler and more honest and friendly lives than what we were brought up to see were in store for us. Which of course didn't always turn out that way and sometimes we could be as petty as the so-called "straight" people.
I don't know. It was for us an alternative lifestyle. There was a lot of communal living and sharing of resources which when it worked was great. Of course some people became pains because they were just taking and not giving anything. Sometimes a person would be head of a house or community but always there was an intention to make it as democratic on the surface as possible. When I lived with bands the guys in the band who were like ten years older would each be responsible for some of us being there because we were only allowed to be there because they let us. So everybody theoretically would do something to contribute whether it was working in the kitchen and cleaning or working menial jobs for low pay as I did or other things. Though of course the guys who brought in the most money of course ended up having the most say. And most of those of us who were still teenagers had very little to say anyway even if we could. But the idea was to make a home, a family, where we could live safely and freely without the onus of having to conform to what our parents and communities in which we grew up thought we should be like.
Most of us came from stable middle and upper class homes though were some street-wise men involved or hanging around selling us drugs or trying to get a mean or have sex with us. The older men had most of the say and they were very into things like music and literature and alternative medicines and things like yoga and Sufism and Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Edgar Cayce, Lao Tzu, Herman Hesse, Ram Dass, The Whole Earth Catalogue and Macrobiotics so some evenings there would be chanting mantras while other evening the guys would talk and lecture on yin and yang or awareness or beauty or something like that. Sometimes they would argue and verbally fight with one another over philosophical disagreements.
We usually had food ready and available for anyone in the house who wanted it which consisted mostly of pretty nutritious fare such as brown rice, vegetables, salads, some kind of meat and vegetable or bean stew and a dessert. Some of the wives or girlfriends of the older guys in charge could cook pretty well and would make special things with which we would help. Anytime or anywhere there was free food we would get wind of it and make that scene often all together.
Drugs were available but they were to be shared with anyone who wanted them. If you were doing something you were given space to experiment but people who just got high all the time became unproductive and would be asked to leave. Some people didn't do drugs at all. others just got high and partied on weekends. We tried to feel good as much of the time as possible and with a band we would go to their gigs and dance, mostly with each other cause not that many of the non-band guys wanted to dance. This was especially true when those Disco line dances started in the mid 70s. In the city there would often be free concerts by good local bands afternoons on weekends which we would go to en masse and get crazy and out of it and just let things flow.
There was a lot of casual sex which most of us were into because we had been brought up that we were supposed to "save" ourselves for the right guy to come along who could take care of us which we were rebelling against. And we wanted sex just to be very natural and simple which we thought it should be so we gave ourselves to a lot of guys who wanted to be with us. Which made us feel desirable and worthwhile like it was something we could do which was wanted. We would regularly be with some of the older guys most of whom were pretty good with us but otherwise we were free to be with who we wanted and or course relationships did form as well as jealousies. When we would have a visitor , especially a sexy one, sometimes we would fight over who got to be with him. In such an atmosphere there was a certain amount of venereal disease and cases of crabs which we had to deal with. And the absence of more rigorous cleanliness did make some of these living situations breeding places for things such as hepatitis which I contracted and had to spend time in the hospital. When I think back to that time I have vivid memories of going to sleep on the dusty floor among piles of cat shit.
I was fortunate in that I had from my parents and home imbibed at least some sort of a work ethic so I could make myself useful and I wasn't just depending on my looks or popularity. When I first went to San Francisco the Vietnam War was still going and most of us wondered why there had to be wars yet there would be men living with us who had fought but were through with all that now and were just trying to get on with their lives the same way we were. "Make Love Not War" used to be a big thing in those days and we really thought if enough people could get laid they would stop being so "uptight" and not need to go to war. Peace meant the absence of war, the absence of conflict.
If we became pregnant and no one came forward as the father the whole house was supposed to raise the child. Because we believed less in nuclear type family than in communal family and we used to say that the "universe" actually raised the child. But a lot of the time the girl would pair off with someone whether the father or not and they would become a couple or one of the older guys would the surrogate father. Should mention that in the 70s that was before most of us started deciding to carry our pregnancies to term. I got pregnant with my boyfriend in 1977 and did not even think twice about having an abortion. Which I have regretted ever since.
We liked being "countercultural" and it was something we fit into whereas where we had come from we never felt as though could fit in and certainly that we were not important enough to fit in. The way we were living we could all more easily fit in because it was much more understandable to us. Though of course it carried its own pressures as well. We were not supposed to "uptight" or "hung-up" and not worry or lay "guilt trips" on anyone. So in general anything that went against the easygoing go-with-the-flow kind of life was regarded as suspect.
This post was edited by officegirl at July 9, 2018 8:58 AM MDT
I read every word. It sounds exciting and in many ways idyllic but also a little scary at times, certainly from a health point of view. Thank you, I always wondered.
I always imagined that had I been alive in the 60's, I would have been a flower child. My mom always agreed with me. Despite my dad's objections, she did expose me to Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, etc. :)
officegirl 