‘Free Love’ sounds like a great marketing campaign.
It was the sexual ethos of the hippie movement which was born in the Summer of Love in 1967. This “Free Love” ethic, if you can call it that, was essentially to upturn the sexual mores of America’s Puritanic-heritage and open intimate romantic encounters outside the marital covenant.
The Hippies were not the first to endorse a Laissez-faire, or ‘anything goes,’ approach to romantic encounters in US or West, but they were the movement that broke the American Culture’s back when it comes to what is acceptable behavior in terms of romantic intimacy and the need for marriage to protect that act.
The Hippie Neighborhood
I grew up in an evangelical home where we had our rear in a pew every Sunday morning. My teenage years were more rebellious, and I loved the writing of the Beat Generation (1950s-1960s) and the Hippies (1960s-1970s) because their pen was a wag of the tongue I could embrace.
I was aware that there was a neighborhood where the Hippies started, but didn’t really know much about the neighborhood called Haight-Ashbury until, a decade later, I was a converted Christian looking for neighborhoods in San Francisco to start a church in.
“The Haight” - alternatively, “Upper Haight” and “Haight-Ashbury” is the location where much of the hippie movement started in the Summer of 1967 and spread throughout America’s large and small cities, changing all kinds of ways that it meant to be an American.
I was drawn to the neighborhood, and eventually started a ministry there called Jesus People SF, in honor of the Jesus People Movement which coincidentially also started in that neighborhood in 1967 in an effort to evangelize the masses of young people pouring in to see what the trend was about.
There’s really not much left of the Hippies in Haight Ashbury today. It’s a gentrified tourist-trap image of its former self.
One aspect, however, that you can find consistent from the Summer of Love ‘67 and now are the street kids, who are called ‘travelers.’
Yesterday’s ‘Hippies’ and Today’s ‘Travelers’
The Travelers are not a Time Magazine adorning, gawking-public sort of movement like the original hippies were. These are mostly kids (teens to twenties aged) who travel via makeshift busses, camper vans, cars, train-hopping and hitchhiking.
Many of them come from families with serious drinking and abuse - among other parental quality issues, and often run away from home before adulthood.
The Travelers also happened to be some of my best friends when I was living and ministering in The Haight.
They were far easier to get to know and talk to than the $3k/ month apartment living ‘Tech Bros’ who were mostly fearful they might die of the Coronavirus while shopping at The Whole Foods next to Golden Gate Park.
The Cost of ‘Freedom’
Even though these young travelers were my best friends in the Haight, they had their persistent vices (mostly addiction-based), and these often prevented them from accepting the gospel I shared with them.
When it comes down to it, the existence of “Travelers” who wander the West Coast in vans is an indirect product of the Summer of Love.
Even though Americans did not adopt the Hippie idea of living as a philosophy, the Hippie mentality to just about everything has left an imprint on our contemporary world.
The Travelers travel not just for the love of the road like Jack Kerouac, but rather because their “home” was pretty nasty.
Their homes were mostly nasty because of the acceptance of loose-sexuality as a shruggable offense and even the standard of what’s normal in American romantic relationships. Loose-sexuality led to bad homelife (no secure parental relationship) and bad homelife made a subculture called “traveler” necessary for them to find acceptance and friendship.
The Travelers exist because the Hippies did. As much as being a friend to Travelers was fun, it was hard watching them struggle mentally, and financially.
I can’t help but wonder what the experience of coming to SF and planting a church would have looked like if America had never accepted “free love.”
The struggle experienced by the Travelers is just one microcosm of the effects of libritarian sexuality. These costs I hope are now so apparent that I hope we are finally waking up to and will turn away from as a people.
Nate
S.D.G.