By Annalee Newitz

AT THE HEIGHT of the Eisenhower era, in 1955, the San Francisco Chronicle had a "women's news" section. Packed with advice about marriage, cooking, and losing weight, it included advertisements for toaster-grills and fashion spreads of women in puffy skirts, their hair teased into tasteful swells and curls. Suburban tract homes dominated the real estate pages. And men wore hats.

It's a truism to say that 1950s popular culture offered audiences a varnished version of social reality: the Chronicle's women's pages don't explain why housewives became suicidal cocktail addicts; there are no oppressed black people in Leave It to Beaver; and the perky educational videos that archivist Rick Prelinger has preserved with such devotion offer simple tales of social hygiene that cannot explain why Sal Mineo gazed with such longing at James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

But somehow, despite the culture industry propaganda machine and the political machinations of Joe McCarthy, a message about San Francisco's subversive qualities managed to reach the masses. Popular culture is not always a conservative force. Indeed, the images of San Francisco that percolated out into Eisenhower-era pop culture played no small role in making the city a symbol of exuberant subversion during one of the 20th century's most politically retrograde periods.

Audrey Goodfriend, a San Francisco activist who helped found the radical Walden School and KQED during the 1950s, says she came to the city after reading an article called "The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy" in Harper's magazine during the late 1940s. The article's author, Mildred Brady, detailed the antics of a group of San Francisco artists and anarchists led by critic Kenneth Rexroth. Goodfriend, an antiwar activist during World War II, recalled that this bit of sensationalist journalism was enough to tempt her into moving to the city. Here she found the group of anarchists she'd been looking for. Most of the people in her new social scene were also nonmonogamous, and that, she says, "was hard" for her. Somehow, despite the blandness of the "women's news" in the Chronicle, the city managed to attract enough women interested in free love that it was difficult to fit in if you weren't polyamorous.

San Francisco's image in mass culture as the city of sex and anarchy came into focus during 1955, when two very different media events rocketed the city to the center of national consciousness. The first event was Allen Ginsberg's spirited reading of his epic lyric poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery. The second was the release of hit atomic-monster film It Came from Beneath the Sea, featuring special effects by Ray Harryhausen, whose work was as state-of-the-art as something by the Wachowski brothers or Pixar today. While these events couldn't be further from each other culturally – one was the performance of an underground poem about beauty and transgression, the other a Hollywood movie about an atom-crazed giant octopus who wants to eat the Golden Gate Bridge and Ferry Building – both managed to convey a sense of San Francisco as a place where tremendous social changes were taking place. No matter what President Eisenhower and conservative S.F. mayor Elmer Robinson might have said about it, resistance kept rising up out of the depths and threatening to wrap the city in its tentacles.

Before Ginsberg read "Howl" to an audience of half-drunk beats and politicos at the Six Gallery, Rexroth introduced him in a rather telling way. According to Michael Schumacher, a local who attended, Rexroth "compared the climate of San Francisco to that of Barcelona at the time of the Spanish anarchists, where culture survived despite an oppressive national political environment." When Ginsberg read his ode to his generation of outlaw visionaries, which included a memorable line about getting fucked in the ass "by saintly motorcyclists," he became an instant celebrity.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had opened all-paperback bookstore City Lights two years before, offered to publish "Howl" in his City Lights Pocket Poets series. Its publication in late 1955 set off one of the most infamous obscenity trials of the 20th century. Ferlinghetti was put on trial for publishing the book; represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, he managed to win the case in 1957 when a judge determined the book had social merit. Articles about the trial in Life and Time acted as a beacon: soon the entire nation knew there was a place to go if you couldn't be what passed for normal in the mid 1950s.

In an odd way, however, San Francisco's reputation as a city full of unapologetic queers, brainy rebels, and political artists is portrayed even more starkly – albeit covertly – in It Came from Beneath the Sea. You might look at Harryhausen's sleek, slick octopus as the nation's revenge on a city that refuses to behave. After all, if those faggots and commies insist on living out in the open, obviously they deserve to be slimed by voracious, out-of-control sea creatures. But what few people remember about the film is that San Francisco is saved by a no-nonsense woman scientist, Dr. Joyce, who at one point refuses to get married and settle down because she wants to pursue her career. In one of the film's many telling moments, Dr. Joyce's colleague informs a man who is pursuing her that he needs to stop being so traditional if he wants to be with her.

Undeniably, the film was mostly an excuse to fantasize about stop-motion tentacles wrapping themselves around the Golden Gate Bridge. But nevertheless, even this mainstream movie registered some of the same cultural shifts that Ginsberg's poem did. Men in "Howl" could refuse to work for the industrial war machine and fall in love with each other; women in It Came from Beneath the Sea could refuse to quit their jobs and save a city from destruction. Images like these, no matter how farcical, had very real social effects. Cultural refugees fled to San Francisco from all over the world, seeking a fantasy city of saintly motorcyclists and octopus-slaying female scientists.

According to a 1958 article in the Chronicle called "Life and Love among the Beats," the once underground culture of "Howl" was all over the city. The article takes prurient readers on a pub crawl of the city's hippest beat joints, giving us a salacious peek at "picking up homosexuals in gay bars" and letting us gawk at "the interracial bit," white women dating black men.

But San Francisco's reputation for disobedience was obvious even as the 1950s began. A 1950 series of Chronicle articles called attention to the "widespread marijuana use" among the city's teenagers. And in 1954 an article in the same paper – albeit not in the "women's news" section – declared that "San Francisco is the headquarters for red-light district recruiters in the North [of California]."

Herb Caen, in an early-'50s follow-up to his best-selling Baghdad by the Bay titled simply Baghdad 1951, decries the city's "hatless men" and girls without chaperones. Yet even though he went fuddy-duddy on the beats, he still reveled in his hometown's naughty reputation. During what he calls "pro-ho-bition," he recalls nostalgically that "you could get a good drink anywhere in town for a quarter." Every San Francisco generation has its own brand of rebellion; Caen just couldn't stand the one he saw creeping into his beloved city in the 1950s.

But others rejoiced in it. And their irrepressible challenge to midcentury conformity couldn't be contained, even by the popular culture whose mission is so often to reinforce the status quo. Word got out that San Francisco was the place to come for sex and anarchy. And the word is still getting out. The nation may be obsessed with patriotism and movies about Jesus, but everybody knows that in our city, queers are marrying each other and war protesters are bringing the joint down.