All posts by Woodstock Whisperer

Attended the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, became an educator for 35 years after graduation from college, and am retired now and often volunteer at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts which is on the site of that 1969 festival.
Today in history

Saturday Evening Post Hippie

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Saturday Evening Post Hippie

September 23, 1967

Saturday Evening Post Hippie

hip·pie, noun

Especially in the 1960s, a person of unconventional appearance, typically having long hair and wearing beads, associated with a subculture involving a rejection of conventional values and the taking of hallucinogenic drugs.

Synonyms: flower child, Bohemian, beatnik, long-hair, free spirit, nonconformist, dropout.

Saturday Evening Post Hippie

Genesis

In 1958, deliberately associating young non-conformists with the Red Menace of Communism, the media picked up on the term Beatnik first used by San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist Herb Caen.

Those who choose to or are thrust into a counter-cultural position always face the the Establishment’s sticks and stones.

Seven years later another San Francisco newsman, Michael Fallon, this time from the Examiner, christened a younger generation’s counter-cultural with the term hippie in an article about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse.

Saturday Evening Post Hippie

Fallon described the young woman at the start of his article as “A pale fragile girl shrouded in a pink burlap shawl which concealed her mouth and jaw and flapped down around her knees…. She looked as though she might have survived, narrowly, an attack by Bedouins.”

Not complimentary.

Saturday Evening Post Hippie

How many “hippies”?

On tours in the Museum at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, I talk about who attended the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. If we judge by by the mainstream media’s pictures taken that weekend, there were 500,000 hippies: unwashed (unless they were skinny dipping in Fillipini Pond), muddy (unless they weren’t), high (unless they weren’t), long-haired (unless they weren’t), drop outs (ditto, eh?).

I will show guests a picture I took that day and point out that if one looks beyond the many media hippie images, one will find “a lot of white kids getting sunburned.”

Saturday Evening Post Hippie
photo by J Shelley. Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Saturday 16 August 1969

The Saturday Evening Post was not the first print media to feature an article about the so-called hippie. Keep in mind that in 1967 there were still just three major–actually two major (NBC & CBS) and one not so major (ABC)–TV networks. No 24-hour news cycle. No tweets. No electronic social networks. Millions of readers subscribed to magazines, newspapers, or journals. In the 1950s, the Post had reached 6 million households per week!

Perhaps as a reminder of the print media’s sway, keep in mind E F Hutton’s successful commercial approach in the 1970s and 1980s. Remember “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen”? That’s the kind of power the print media still had, though it was starting to wane.

Saturday Evening Post Hippie

Saturday Evening Post Hippie

Hippie Cult

The Post’s article suggested (strongly) that a hippie belonged to a cult. Unthinking, brainwashed, taken advantage of. The cover’s headline includes the questions (that the article inside will apparently answer):

  • Who are they
  • What do they want
  • Why do they act that way

In addition to the hippie article [Hippies: Slouching Towards Bethlehem], the edition also had The Howard Hughes Underground, The Brothers Smothers, Tom & Dick, The Rescuer, and Will Joe Frazier Be The Next Champ?

In early 1969, Martin Ackerman announced that the February 8, 1969, issue would be the magazine’s last. Ackerman stated that the magazine had lost $5 million in 1968 and would lose a projected $3 million in 1969.

This time, it was the Saturday Evening Post doing the slouching. Toward bankruptcy. [full disclosure: it did resurrect itself and is now a bimonthly and digital publication.]

Saturday Evening Post Hippie
Hippie,  Saturday Evening Post Hippie,  Saturday Evening Post Hippie, 
LGBTQ, Today in history

Hero Oliver Sipple Outed

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Hero Oliver Sipple Outed

San Francisco, September 22, 1975

Sara Jane Moore

mugshot of Sara Jane Moore
Hero Oliver Sipple Outed

Two Michigan guys and a mom

Two Michigan guys, strangers to each other, got out of two different beds on September 22, 1975. Neither imagined that someone was about to intertwine their lives forever. That someone was Sara Jane Moore. She got up that morning intending to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Moore put on baggy tan pants and a neatly pressed blue raincoat.  The 45-year-old mother of four packed a chrome revolver.

Hero Oliver Sipple Outed

Oliver W Sipple

President Fort had addressed a conference at the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Outside was Oliver W Sipple, a 33-year-old ex-marine, twice-wounded in Vietnam. He  happened to be downtown that day and thought, “Why not stick around and see the President.” As the President left the hotel, Sipple was standing near Moore when he noticed her outstretched arm holding a revolver. Sipple yelled “The bitch has got a gun” and lunged at her. The bullet missed Ford and hit a cab driver who, fortunately, was only wounded.

With so much media around, a picture caught the moment: Sipple on the far left, Moore circled in red.

Hero Oliver Sipple Outed

Hero

President Ford sent a letter to Sipple. It said in part,

“I want you to know how much I appreciated your selfless actions last Monday…. The events were a shock to us all, but you acted quickly and without fear for your own safety.

“By doing so you helped to avert danger to me and to others in the crowd. You have my heartfelt appreciation.”
Hero Oliver Sipple Outed

Outed

Navy veteran Harvey Milk was openly gay and active in San Francisco politics, He saw Sipple’s bravery as an opportunity to demonstrate that a gay person could also be a hero. Milk contacted San Francisco journalist Herb Caen. A few day’s later, Caen wrote about Milk, Sipple, and Sipple being gay. The new component to Sipple’s life went national.

Being a gay ex-Marine who displayed bravery both in uniform and again as a civilian sadly changed the story’s arc. For many, it somehow tempered their view of that courage, even in San Francisco, a place more (but not completely) tolerant of gays.

On September 29, William Safire wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Sipple is guilty of committing heroism in public, and is trying to hold on to the last shreds of the privacy that was stripped from him as a consequence of his selfless act. He is probably under family pressure to go one way, and under peer‐group pressure to go the other, with publicity stakes fairly high. He will think twice before he does any good deed again.”

Until his brave act, Sipple’s parents did not know of is sexual orientation. Finding out, his parents disowned him and later when Sipple’s mother died, Mr Sipple told his son he was not welcome to attend the funeral.

Keep in mind that on September 19th, just three days before the assassination attempt, a three‐member panel of Air Force officers took 4 hours 27 minutes  to conclude that T.Sgt. Leonard P. Matlovich, gay, was unfit for military service.

Hero Oliver Sipple Outed

Aftermath

Sipple sued the Chronicle for invasion of privacy. The Superior Court in San Francisco dismissed the suit. Sipple continued his legal battle. In May 1984 the California Supreme Court refused to reinstate his invasion-of-privacy suit. His lawyer said that Sipple would have been better off ”if he had let that woman shoot.”

Hero Oliver Sipple Outed

Death

Oliver W. Sipple death is listed as February 2, 1989. That is the day authorities discovered his body. He had likely been dead for a few days. He was 47.

Papers reported that he had received treatment for schizophrenia, alcoholism and several other health problems. He weighed nearly 300 pounds when he died. His apartment was in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco, a mainly low rent district. By that time, Sipple’s days  consisted of getting up and going to a bar to drink.

On the wall of his apartment hung the framed letter from Ford.

President Ford, the man who pardoned the un-convicted President who’d broken laws as President, had never invited the man who saved his life to the White House. Some conjectured that that failure was due to Sipple’s sexual orientation. The President said his letter had been enough.

 

Moore

Sara Jane Moore pleaded guilty. At her sentencing to life in prison she stated “Am I sorry I tried? Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life. And, no, I’m not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger.“

Moore escaped from prison in 1979 for a few hours. She later said, “If I knew that I was going to be captured…I would have stopped at the local bar just to get a drink and a burger.”

On December 31, 2007, Moore, 77, was released from prison on parole after serving 32 years of her life sentence. When the media asked about her crime Moore stated, “I am very glad I did not succeed. I know now that I was wrong to try.”

In May 2009, NBC’s Matt Lauer interviewed her on the “Today Show.” (NYT article)

Radiolab, an outstanding podcast, presented a program on Oliver Sipple on September 21, 2017. Here is the link to that podcast.

Hero Oliver Sipple Outed
Today in history

1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ 

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1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ

from Claude Debussy,  “Trois Chansons de Bilitis”
founded September 21, 1955

1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ

Deep history

On Museum tours at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts I try to emphasize to guests that the many movements  we associate the 60s with were not new. What was historic was the chronological convergence of so many movements.

And so it is with the gay rights movement. Most people think of the so-called Stonewall Riots in July 1969 as the beginning of LGBTQ activism. It certainly is an important milepost, but not the beginning.

Like any view contrary to the status quo’s view, the idea that homosexuality is a normal human trait, not an illness, not an immoral lifestyle, has deeper roots than 1969. And as progressive-appearing as the following chronology is, keep in mind that there were far more homophobic  incidents and politically- biased initiatives than positive during the time period.

  • In 1873: English writer  John Addington Symonds’ 1873 essay “A Problem in Greek Ethics,” extolled the ancient Greeks’ liberal views of sexuality, helped seed a revolution by paving a literary path for the modern gay rights movement. Fully aware of the potentially incendiary contents of his work, Symonds limited the first print run of his essay at ten copies, cautiously circulating them among only trusted colleagues. In the century and a half since the work’s 1883 publication, scholars have painstakingly collected the five versions known to survive. Then, Johns Hopkins University curator Gabrielle Dean stumbled upon a long-forgotten sixth in 2019. He noted that the Greeks accepted and even celebrated relationships between men, offering a stark contrast with the values of 19th-century England, where homosexuality was illegal. Rachel Wallach for Johns Hopkins’ Hub wrote that his essay was the first major English language analysis of ancient Greek sexuality.
  • in 1910 anarchist Emma Goldman spoke of the need for acceptance.
  • on December 10, 1924,  Henry Gerber founded  The Society for Human Rights in Chicago. It was the first US gay rights organization.
  • on January 5, 1948, Alfred Kinsey and his team published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. It helped allow objective discussions  of homosexuality.
  • on November 11, 1950, in Los Angeles, gay rights activist Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society. The Society aimed to “eliminate discrimination, derision, prejudice and bigotry,” to assimilate homosexuals into mainstream society, and to cultivate the notion of an “ethical homosexual culture.”
  • in January 1953, LGBT:  ONE, Inc. an early gay rights organization and associated with the Mattachine Society published the first  issue of ONE Magazine
  • on September. 14, 1953  Alfred Kinsey published a second study,  Sexual Behavior in the Human Female This one reported that “2 to 6% of females, aged 20-35, were more or less exclusively homosexual in experience/response.”
1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ

San Francisco

And in San Francisco on September 21, 1955 the Daughters of Bilitis became the first lesbian rights organization in the US.

1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ

Pierre Louÿs

The name for the group came from an 1894 collection of  lesbian-themed poems, Les Chansons de Bilitis, Pierre Louÿs. He said  the poems were his interpretation of poems that the ancient Greek poet Sappho wrote. Louÿs wrote that Sappho had found the poems on a wall and that a woman Bilitis wrote them. Louÿs was actually the original author.

1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ

The DOB

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were two of the founders. They simply wanted to dance together. That was against the law in 1955. One of Daughters of Bilitis’s primary purposes was to host social functions and to provide alternatives to the frequently-raided lesbian bars and clubs.

Though small in membership, the DOB had chapters across the US.

As with any organization that society views as made up of perverted or sick individuals, those members differed in their views as to how to react. Should there even be a reaction? Would any reaction simply bring more attention and more discrimination? Should a reaction be as strong as society’s actions?

Gradually the DOB became as much a political as social organization.

1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ

The Ladder

1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ

In October 1956 DOB published the first issue of The Ladder.  Lyon edited it initially under the pen name Ann Ferguson. The Ladder published until  1972.  Barbara Grier and the DOB president Rita LaPorte both felt a  stronger lesbian feminist stance was needed. Should the DOB align itself with male gay rights groups? And by 1972, the feminist movement was seen by many as equally if not more important.

1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ

Short-lived 

After 14 years the DOB dissolved, but it had helped continue the historic tradition of the LGBTQ community organizing and educating Society

1955 Daughters Bilitis LGBTQ