Love, Sex and Loneliness in San Francisco

In 1970, I was living in a political commune in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. I lived with several other people in a house on Frederick street. Some of us were a part of the San Francisco Newsreel Collective and others were freelance radical and hippies. All of them were white except for me.

I started going to meetings of this group associated with the American Friends Society. They were helping the Hopi people by publicizing their struggle against the huge Black Mesa Coal mine. At the meetings I met Jean, who was in her mid twenties, slim…