Summer of (gay) Love: a new exhibit
As San Francisco takes a summerlong pause to consider the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, a new exhibition at the GLBT History Museum teases out the queer people and queer stories who were critical to that moment in history — and, in doing so, charts a path from one movement to another.
“I don’t think there would have been that latter-day (queer) history without what happened in 1967,” says Joey Cain, the exhibit’s curator. “The idea of the pursuit of the authentic self was, I think, essential . ... That so formed and so freed up space that you were able to
have larger liberation movements.”
In an effort to illustrate this point — and, more broadly, tell queer histories that don’t often get told — Cain has gathered photographs, film stills, writings and other printed ephemera for what he calls “LavenderTinted Glasses: A Groovy Gay Look at the Summer of Love, 1967.” The exhibition, which will be up through Sept. 27, tells its story by focusing acutely on four big names: poet Allen Ginsberg, singer Janis Joplin, filmmaker Kenneth Anger and perhaps the least known of the four, philosopher Gavin Arthur.
One photograph shows Joplin, hair just slightly windblown, serene and smiling. It’s a quiet moment, the sort that isn’t often highlighted in her biography. “You see the humanity in her, I think,” Cain says. Another shows Ginsberg dancing, hands in the air, to the Grateful Dead. “It just symbolizes so much of what that period was,” Cain says. “There was this sort of ecstasy, this celebration, but there was a serious element to it.”
These sorts of personal moments are presented alongside examples of their work. There are a speech by Ginsberg, stills from Anger’s psychedelic avantgarde films, and bits of Arthur’s astrological and philosophical writings as they appeared in issues of the San Francisco Oracle.
The Oracle, which Cain describes as “the major repository in writing of the great high ideals that were being developed in the Haight” at the time, is also featured prominently. It wasn’t a gay publication, Cain says, but it did act as a “vehicle” for the sorts of concepts that would greatly inform the coming gay liberation movement. Ideas around the authentic self and free love and sexual freedom filled its pages.
Given the way marginalized histories are so rarely kept safe or recorded at all, Cain says he had some trouble pulling the exhibit together. “I wanted to get down to the people who were there on the ground, and it’s been a little hard to do that.”
So he’s hoping the exhibit will help bring more queer people and their stories out into the open, especially those of people of color and transgender individuals. If that happens, he says, he’s ready to record them. “This is always about recovering the stories that haven’t been written down, that haven’t been told.”