“This Was My Utopia”

Sexual Experimentation and Masculinity in the 1960s Bay Area Radical Left

Abstract

When Huey P. Newton argued that in order to have a chance to be free, black people would have to discard “all these romantic, fictional fin[a]lisms, such as they’re married and they live happily ever after with a white picket fence,” he expressed a sentiment that was shared across the movements of the day, including the sexual and gay liberation movements.^[1] Amid the political ferment of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area in the second half of the 1960s, activists across various movements enacted utopian alternatives to the nuclear family norm. This essay follows three influential figures who both typified and shaped these alternatives in the late 1960s: Huey P. Newton, Richard Thorne, and Leo Laurence. Newton led the Black Panther Party starting in 1966, Thorne led the East Bay Sexual Freedom League in 1966, and Laurence led the Committee for Homosexual Freedom starting in 1969. Newton and Thorne were black activists with shared roots in Oakland’s early black power movement while Laurence was a white gay liberation activist with experience in Thorne’s Sexual Freedom League. The personal and organizational links between these three leaders illuminate a shared culture of sexual experimentation that connected the gay liberation and black power movements. Reframing the narrative of late 1960s Bay Area radicalism around Newton, Thorne, and Laurence recasts the political coalitions that bridged myriad organizations across the left by the end of the decade. The left’s culture of sexual experimentation grounds these coalitions in a broader arc of sexual utopianism that was both subversive and deeply masculinist. Understanding this culture and Newton’s deep roots in it illuminates his adoption of new language uniting the black power, women’s liberation, and gay liberation movements in his 1970 Statement of Solidarity.

^[1] “Interviews & Other Recordings: 1970 September 13 Huey P Newton, transcript,” (hereafter "Newton interview") 65-66, 13 September 1970, Box 2 Folder 5, Series 1: Black Panther Party files, 1966-2010, J. Herman Blake and Emily L. Moore papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.”