40 love

Four wild decades of Guardian valentines

So, like, love and stuff. What's up with all that? Heck if we can tell you. After 40 years of chronicling the wild torques of Bay Area ardor — summer of love, free love, any love, love hangover, strange love, one love, ghetto love, love parades — the only thing we know for sure is that you can't pin it down with words. Every time you think you've bent your mind around love's crazy diamond — blam! It lobs you another space elephant. And that's cool — it's the endless unknown that seduces, the random quest that gives this town its charming political restlessness. Because in the City of Love, darling, romance is the ultimate politics. And, just like politics, the more love changes, the more love often seems to stay the same.

Another Valentine's Day is on its way, the cherry trees are in early blossom, and the tingle of media-fed romantic anxiety will soon be slaked by a throatful of corny Hallmark. In anticipation, and in celebration of our 40th year around town, we thought we'd head down to the Guardian archives, leaf through four long decades, and see what some of the Bay Area's best writers had to say about love, sex, romance — and the commercialization of all three. Whether you consider love a lottery or a bedrock (or both, in a lot of beds), it seems we've covered every freaky angle of your fancy. Enjoy.

THE '60S: SOUND AND FURY

Who notes the sweetness of my lady's voice

Will find therein more than a sweet demanding:

For though sweet grace-notes turn him from his choice

She yet demands, though charmed, his understanding.

So kicked off our 1966 inaugural issue — published in the run-up to 1967's Summer of Love — with the words of poet Kenneth Fields. Can't you just hear the amorous lutes? While Fields had enough ironic taste to title his flowery lines "Clearly Archaic," his sentiments were fully in tune with the folk revival filling hip-length hair with various flora at the time.

But all that fabulous faux-Shakespearean grandeur would soon turn to unstoppered outrage in 1969, with the trial of the Chicago Seven and riots in the streets. The issue in which the Guardian first cried out for its great unrequited love, public power, also included critic William Anderson's classic prose-poem review of the Living Theater's performance of "Paradise Now" in Berkeley. Love itself was pushed aside for much more pressing concerns:

"The audience is shouting like bullhorns, and the cast is screaming ANARCHISM! ANARCHISM! ANARCHISM!

'What about the starving blacks? How do we get the pigs off campus?' yells go up from the audience ...

'By love! By life! By the force of the revolutionary imagination,' an actor screams, almost hidden by the raging Berkeley young.

'Bull s___!' shouts a student. An actress runs up to him, sticks her dead white face right into his, and screams 'F___ you. F___ you!'

'If you're woman enough, I'm man enough,' he screams right back."

And "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies was the year's number one hit record.

THE '70S: FREE FALLIN'

"Women in the Ashram — Who Washes the Dishes?" demanded our 1975 Valentine's cover, and an eight-page pullout guide to the Bay Area's spiritual community "for the converted and curious" (including an intro to est, "the clockwork raising consciousness") proved mainstream romantic notions were the furthest thing from our minds in the early '70s. The Guardian's Personals section was nationally famous for its freaky panorama of sexual liberation and desire ("Third World Woman will unzip skin for wholehearted communication," "Open parties for attractive couples in mellow, woodsy Marin home"), and chemical love was in the air. Ads for bathhouses ("Let your Frederick's of Hollywood and your leather jock straps all hang out at the Sutro Baths") and gypsy violinists "for all your lovemaking party needs" filled our pages. It was crazy, man.

But if the excesses of free love in the early part of the decade had us fleeing to the Bhagwan with a second-wave feminist critique, by the late '70s the emphasis was back on sex — or rather the burnout from too much of it. In 1978 writer W.A. Van Winkle brought together a Platonic symposium of the Bay Area's best-known free-love authors and thinkers for a sunny little bonbon called "Can Romance Survive the '70s?" that began, "Another Valentine's Day has crept up on us, bringing with it nothing but pathetic despair over last year's disappointments and frustrations.... There is no hope." Apparently all those hot tubs and wife swaps had left folks more than a lee-tle bitter. Here are some typical quotes:

From Cyra McFadden, chronicler of Marin's swinger scene in The Serial: "I think the new independence has produced a more selfishly motivated individual. I think we've developed an extraordinary amount of solipsism from what started out as a good thing — examining one's own life and one's own motives — and I think we've carried that to the extreme, especially in the past few years."

From Charles Reich, philosopher of the "new consciousness" and scribe of The Greening of America: "The most disappointing thing for me right now is that I have no relationship with a man, although I've taken all the risks of going out in that direction. I think one reason is that the gay world seems to be so stylized and given to superficiality, and that isn't what I'm looking for.... People tend to see each other as threats, and it's as easy as not to have a brief encounter and then get out of the way. It's hard to get anything working. But I do have a relationship with a woman."

And from a young, recently uncloseted Armistead Maupin, he of Tales of the City fame, on forswearing gay life altogether (he even took out an M4W personal ad in the Guardian): "I'm suddenly realizing I'm 33 years old and talk a big line about how everything should be possible. I think there are a lot of gay men who have come to happy, satisfying sexual relationships with women. It made them relax about their homosexuality.... Besides, I like tits."

Things had gotten so bewildering that by 1979, amid ads for discount Lurex disco clothing and the Ma Bell Picturephone, we actually recommended sending your love a silent valentine from the Mime Messenger Service, paired with a "Love Carefully Day" gift pack from the Zero Population Growth organization, which included "a bright red condom with a message on the back about teenage pregnancy." Romantic. Why not just go all the way, with a heart-strewn wired jaw and a Valentine vasectomy?

THE '80S: SPLINTERS AND GLOSS

By the 1980s, all that mushy remorse and wilting repression had hardened and fractured into identity politics, with straights, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, "celebates, androgynes and abstinates" all jostling to define themselves in as narrow terms as possible. AIDS froze those divisions in place, and Madison Avenue ran with the marketing possibilities. Every love was a lifestyle and had its own strict modes of dress and identification. "Love is a many-splintered thing," Sandra Shea sighed in a 1983 Valentine's Day feature, going on to advocate the somewhat-safe, anticapitalist joys of "auto-romanticism." "The auto-romantic state is best achieved when you're loose: goofing off, or just doing something considered childish and self-indulgent ... even something nihilistic," she wrote. ("Bend. Reach. Sweat. Lift. Resist. Burn. Hold. Jane Fonda's Workout. It Works," a nearby ad extolled.)

Pushing on in the love-makes-lifestyle vein, but sounding a smidge more upbeat about it, Isadora Alman, in her "Relationships 1985: The Winds of Change" V-Day cover story, wrote, "Whether celibate or active, single, coupled or tripled, gay, hetero or bisexual — from all these choices come not only confusion but the real possibility of creating a style of life that is personally satisfying.

"It is now possible for us to buy vibrators at the supermarket, and decide whether or not to be a parent, alone or coupled," Alman continued. But "with all this amazing array of choices from the Bay Area lifestyle buffet comes equally expanded opportunities to mess up." Word. And where's that supermarket, again?

Some actual romance did manage to snake its way through all the Reagan-era sexual politics, but it was the gauzy, Vaseline-lensed, Cybill-Shepherd-on-Moonlighting kind. "We asked Z. Budapest, a local feminist witch, to give us some advice for the lovelorn," a 1987 Valentine's piece begins. "Pretend I am a prurient visitor from outer space, and have never seen a human body. Take me on a verbal tour of yours," another suggests, as a "possible path to intimacy." And here's Judy Berkley, in a feature titled "Swearing by the Inconstant Moon": "That's what love in the '80s seems to be about — a rosary of romances instead of one big perfect pearl yielded up by the Oyster of Life." Wow. Somebody light a persimmon-scented candle and dial up Fabio on the Princess phone — quick!

THE '90S–PRESENT DAY: NEATO!

"With weak-stomached conservatism clamping down on alternative sexuality, sexy art, and irreverent politics, San Francisco's homo-punks, mad-as-hell AIDS activists, fun-loving dykes, and just about everyone else with something to say are talking back with louder voices, hotter porn and better graphics," Cate C. Corcoran declared in 1992. Love was a dirty word again, and the Guardian's pages bloomed with naughty erotica, sex toy reviews, and bad-ass drawings of love-struck devils. Love is the devil — get it?

We also proudly celebrated the retro-kitsch, DIY naïveté that would become the fetish of a generation. "Back in grammar school, it was acceptable to be really excited about making the valentines themselves, to become intoxicated by a combination of lace doilies, red construction paper, and glue fumes and come home from school beaming, with glitter in your hair," Nell Bernstein wrote in 1991, wracked with a spasm of joyful nostalgia in a piece that called us back to the fumbling, safety-scissors seductions of childhood romance.

And then there was that other thing, the Internet. "Cupid in Cyberspace!" hollered our 1997 V-Day cover story, in which Eric Stephan extolled the joys of online romance. Usenet, CU-SeeMe, "cyberlibertarianism" — it all sounded so cybertitillating. "This is 1997," Stephan wrote, "and anonymous Internet sex has moved far beyond what it was in the '80s. Nowadays, the shining hope for horny computer owners is in video conferencing." Thank god that never really happened.

Faith in romantic technology crashed with the bubble; everybody felt distraught. But then love threw us another curveball: Mayor Gavin Newsom bought himself a big, fat press pass with his 2004 Winter of Love, and the streets of San Francisco were filled with ecstatic gay newlyweds. "The laws against gay marriage will never survive, and 20 years from now, refusing to accept those laws will seem so natural and obvious that people will wonder what all the fuss was about," Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond predicted. We're still sorting through the fallout from that brief burst of legitimacy, but unadulterated love was back on the Bay Area menu — and San Francisco was once again the place where folks left their hearts. In 2005 the second annual Love Parade exploded, and the streets were filled with ecstatic ravers. And in 2006 we went meta, gazing back on the wonder of it all ... *

Compiled by Marke B.

marke@sfbg.com