Time, Friday, Sep. 15, 1967
Time was when parents took it almost for granted that any red-blooded boy would sooner or later run away from home on a summertime Tom Sawyer adventure. It was part of growing up, a way to gain experience and nothing to be alarmed about. Sometimes the boy would be gone for a week or so, but generally his plans to join the circus ended about nightfall, when his empty stomach and the animal sounds near his woodsy hideout quickly convinced him that daddy's razorstrop was not so bad after all.
The phenomenon is still seasonal—thousands of teen-agers who ran away in June for a summer-long taste of the hippie life were wending their way back home last week for the beginning of school. But for an increasing number of tormented teenagers, running away is not a lark but a desperately serious act for which returning home is an all but unthinkable conclusion.
School & the Draft. Runaways are a grave problem in every major city, and the problem is growing, partly due to the sharp rise of the teen-age population. Chicago police handled 7,904 runaways last year, up 50% from five years ago; and so far this year the rate has been running 10% higher than 1966. More than 2,000 juveniles were reported missing from the San Francisco Bay Area last year, and 3,000 ran away from their homes in affluent Houston. Overall, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports, U.S. law-enforcement officers arrested 90,246 juvenile runaways last year—almost half of them girls—an increase of almost 10% from the previous year.
What makes them run? "Something inside that was always denied," sigh the Beatles in She's Leaving Home, one of the most popular cuts from their latest Sgt. Pepper album. "They're running away from a system and not just maladjusted homes," insists Dick Chandler, 37, whose first play, The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake, is about a teen-age runaway, and is scheduled to open on Broadway next month starring Jean Arthur as a sympathetic aunt. "Some of them come from very good homes and are given everything," says Chandler, "but it's what the parents stand for, the whole system—the competition, the lack of human values, of humanity in their life." For older teen-age boys, running away is often an escape from the pressures of school and the threat of the draft.
"If you have 20 different runaways, you will have 20 different reasons," says an Atlanta Juvenile Court officer. Kim, 13, ran away to Boston from her Los Angeles home because she could not get along with her new stepfather. "My parents didn't understand me or something," mumbles Paul, 15, who first left his Virginia home two years ago, and prowls the streets of Manhattan's East Village every day looking for the next place to stay.
No Hang-Ups. Dutch is 14, wears braces on his teeth and still speaks in a boyish treble, but all it took to send him scampering from Columbus to Chicago's bohemian Old Town district was the prospect of military school. Joe, 17, blames his run from Tampa, Fla. to Atlanta on parental neglect. "I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life," says Joe, the youngest member of Atlanta's small hippie colony. "This is more like a family than you could find, really, because there are no hang-ups."
Though not all teen-agers run away with the intention of joining the hippies, that is often where they wind up. "It's simply because the hippies will take them in when nobody else will," says Rabbi Samuel Schrage of the New York City Youth Board.
For teen-agers who do run away to the hippies, it is increasingly becoming a bad trip that is not only degrading but also dangerous. After the money runs out, they often turn to begging in order to eat. "There is a lot of panhandling. They are like parasites," says Allan Katzman, 30, editor of Manhattan's underground hippie newspaper, The East Village Other. To a juvenile who is already disturbed, the easy combination of drugs and sex is hardly good medicine; one 13-year-old runaway who began "dropping acid" nine months ago has tried to kill herself three times since.
Summer in the Park. For a place to stay, some runaways roam the streets looking for vacant houses to break into. "Most of them just sleep in the park; after a few nights of that you will go home with anyone—you don't even look," says Manhattan Hippie Jim Fouratt. "They are exploited by all kinds of people," says Fouratt, "and what's going to happen when winter comes and they can't sleep in the park?" Not that sleeping in the park is any too healthy in summer: last week a 15-year-old runaway from upstate New York was raped by two young Negroes and her 17-year-old "flower husband" (known to her only as "the Poet") was beaten unconscious in Central Park where they were sleeping.
Scarcely more salubrious are the "crash pads"—communal sleeping quarters rented by older hippies, who run them as free hotels. They are largely responsible for an alarming increase in venereal disease—up 1,000% in West Hollywood in the past five years. As an alternative to the crash pads, San Francisco's church-financed Huckleberry's for Runaways provides "fugitives" with food and shelter while setting up channels through which they can re-establish relationships with their parents. Operating out of a Victorian house at 1 Broderick Street in the Haight-Ashbury district, Huckleberry's has handled 190 runaways since it was set up two months ago. Most of them, after counseling by four staff psychologists and 13 other volunteers, have gone home.
The Bulletin Board. In tracing their children, parents usually begin by contacting the Missing Persons Bureau and metropolitan newspapers, which, in recent months, have been running increasing numbers of pictures of runaways. More likely sources exist within the hippie communities themselves. In San Francisco, for example, the hippie-run, Haight-Ashbury Switchboard (3873575) not only helps hippies with information and advice about food, lodging and the draft, but also passes dozens of messages from distraught parents along the grapevine every day. Poignant parental pleas appear in the classified ads of underground newspapers, and major hippie hangouts sport bulletin boards crammed with personal messages.
As a last resort, some desperate parents invade hippie country in personal searches for their wayward kids. One New Yorker finally located his 20-year-old son after days of scouring the Hashbury on foot. "Barry came down looking stunned," the father recalls. "It was touching and painful, harder for him, I guess, than for me. It took him ten or 15 minutes just to get back into his face." The reunion lasted only long enough for a short trip to Big Sur. Then Barry went back to Hashbury.
[Electronically Recovered 11/6/2009: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941149,00.html]
Showing posts with label Haight Ashbury. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haight Ashbury. Show all posts
Friday, November 6, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Rev. Charles "Chuck" Lewis
Synopsis of an 86 page transcribed Interview by Paul Gabriel February 8, 1997 (and other dates)
A Part of the GLBT Historical Society's Oral History Project
San Francisco, 1961 ---
On the founding board of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH), Chuck joined the interdenominational group of Urban Specialist including: Clay Caldwell from the United Church of Christ, Bill Black from Lutheran Church in America, Ted McIlvenna a Youth Outreach worker at Glide Memorial Methodist Church and Bill Grace from the Presbyterian Church. Many of the pastors were veterans of the civil rights movement. Chuck saw his role as that of someone who helps to be a calming voice amongst the fighting between the different gay groups. Chuck created a service of dedication for the 6th street community center opened by the Society for Individual Rights (SIR).
Chuck discovered that he was gay later in life (3-4 years after he moved to San Francisco and was working with the gay community). Chuck unintentionally came out at a Dignity conference and then needed to come out to his family so that he could continue working politically and while doing education work nationally. His friends and family considered it “the worst kept secret in town” when he came out.
The CRH was originally founded in order to help youth and reduce the suicide rate, to educate professionals in order to make life easier for gay people and to prevent discrimination. Chuck’s involvement in CRH includes serving as the treasurer for 4 years and president for 2 years and treasurer again for the last 4 years he was involved. CRH is most well known for hosting a fundraiser ball that was raided by the police, receiving much media and legal attention (though it seems like CRH decided not to pursue the legal battles).
During the ball, Chuck tried to thwart the police who were taking pictures of the guests by taking pictures of the police officers. The hope was that the flash bulbs would ruin the police officers photos. The used photo rolls were stored in Jo Chadwick’s bra for safe keeping. After the dance Chuck was so unnerved by the police raid that he walked home and smashed the flash bulbs (to release the energy he wanted to use to beat up a police officer).
The clergy of CRH received some flack from local congregations about all the public activities, but because they were urban specialists paid by the national church (or by private organizations) they were able to be more visible than the local churches were comfortable with.
When it comes to the youth in the Tenderloin, Chuck believes that a myriad of factors brought them to the Tenderloin. Nationally the Vietnam protests, destruction of the nuclear family and homophobia played a role. Added with the rise of identity politics and the unwillingness of people to stay in the closet create a space for gay liberation to bloom amongst the feminist, black power and hippie movements that were transforming the area. Locally, the construction on Market street to create the BART system and the construction of the Moscone Center had moved the young, predominantly white gay (and gay for pay) hustlers to the Tenderloin.
Alongside the people driven movements was a group of clergy at GLIDE who were able to get federal poverty money directed to the Tenderloin. These pastors, like Chuck, were used to working in youth movements who encouraged self governance. While Chuck did not end up working closely with the Vanguard youth, he was a part of the Night Ministry from its inception where he spent a lot of time doing ministry at night within the gay bars where he would run into the youth and the Compton crowd at a bar called Chuckers. The Compton crew were not silly drag queen types with “mops on their heads and balloons in their bra,” they were true transsexuals and beautiful drag queens.
For the most part, the Night Ministry visited gay bars that were male, because the clergy were male and the women’s bars tended to be defined as a space free of men – rather than about sexuality. But overtime and with gentle pastoral care they became accepted in the female spaces as well.
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