But in the hippie days, discipline was out, and wild Dionysian revelry was in. I can't remember the first time I smoked pot, though I do remember getting a joint for my 7th birthday, all wrapped up in a pink ribbon. And the love was certainly what they called "free." My mom tells me it was considered impolite not to sleep with someone when they asked politely. People would pair up, naturally, but relationships were strained by the constant lure of extracurricular screwing. The repression and conservatism of the '50s were rejected with a vengeance, and people coupled and separated and regrouped like pornographic square-dancers.
This was presented to the children as the natural order of things, but we knew there was something wrong. For one thing, a dizzying number of people were always coming and going. Sometimes they'd say goodbye to the kids who had grown attached to them, sometimes not. We were terribly hurt when people we loved just up and left, and we were embarrassed by all the unfettered humping. Adults seemed so ridiculous with their balling and their toking and their weird wiggly dancing to the Grateful Dead. One evening at the commune, the grownups took Quaaludes or mescaline or something, and they all ended up in a big horny, writhing, drugged-out mass on the living room floor. At some point, my mom says, they heard an angry little throat-clearing sound. They looked up, and I was standing in the doorway, fists on my hips, glaring at them. "What exactly do you think you are all DOING?" I yelled.
Things weren't much better when my brother and I visited our father in San Francisco. Despite fairly clear evidence of some early heterosexuality, Dad had always had homosexual leanings. Just as the hippies violently rejected social norms at least partly in response to straitlaced convention, my father exploded out of the closet like a rocket fueled by repressed yearning. With the gay sexual revolution in San Francisco, he was finally free to express that side of himself openly. This was a wonderful thing, but the effects of it were confusing and bizarre for my brother and me. With him, the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name became the Love That Would Not Shut Up.
My father marched, he swung, he went to bars, he talked incessantly about his sexual experiences, and he left copies of Torso and Honcho strewn liberally about his Victorian house in the Haight. At first, my brother and I thought they were just some kind of new mainstream magazine. Certainly, they weren't any more male-centric than Time or Life. Thus misled, we spent many a frustrating hour trying to figure out what was so funny about Tom of Finland cartoons.
Confusingly enough, Dad also had some straight porn as well. I can kind of track his acceptance of his gayness over time by the dwindling ratio of Penthouses to Honchos. By the time I was 9 or 10, he was full-strength, concentrated, half-a-cup-does-the-whole-load gay, and living with a really nice guy named -- I'm not making this up -- Randy.
On arriving at his house for a visit, after months of cultural deprivation up in the boonies, my brother and I would drop our duffel bags at the door and head for the television like patients in an obsessive/compulsive ward. We had lots of cultural reference catching-up to do, and devoured the subtleties of "The Brady Bunch" and "Speed Racer."
The trouble really started when Dad got a VCR. He quickly amassed a large collection of movies, most of them pirated and hand-labeled, and he didn't bother to segregate the porn. Some, like "The Young and the Hung," were easy to avoid. Others were more worrying. My brother and I would consult each other over ambiguous titles like "12 Angry Men." We finally got up the courage to watch that one, but no way were we going near "The 400 Blows." We loved "Arsenic and Old Lace," but it was kept right next to "Run, Little Sailor Boy, Run." Once we put in the wrong tape, and were treated to the sight of a guy being fellated in an alley. "I don't think that's Alec Guinness," said my brother.
The open sexuality and lack of boundaries of the hippie era, which many parents thought would encourage their children to be happy little free spirits, often had diametrically opposite results. At age 8, I had a big crush on a commune guy I'll call Bill. That crush included sexual fantasies. I had just learned about rape, by overhearing someone tell a joke about it. They made it sound like a fun game, and I decided I wanted to try it with Bill. I went and found him, and told him I wanted to rape him. "OK," he said.
Next page: By the time I hit puberty I was already sexually jaded