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, with a soft low voice and a gentle way about her. She had dark hair, a pair of sparkling eyes and a sly sense of humor. I remember one time when we were doing some kind of stretching exercise after a meeting. I joined in and she flashed a beautiful smile at me. I knew then that she was attracted to me.

She grew up in northern New Mexico, and when she was a teenager, she had a blue-eyed Chicano boyfriend whose family went back to the Spanish conquest.

She lived in a rented house in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Sausalito was was covered with steep hillsides and beautiful houses overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Back then, working class people could actually live there below the hills and on the houseboats. Now most have been forced out by high rents.

She lived with her crew cut boyfriend who was also white and a little shorter than her. He was a few years older than her also. She and he got together when she was very sick a few years ago, and he nursed her back to health.

She would drive me back to the Haight-Ashbury when the meetings were over and we would talk. Then she invited me to see her in her apartment in Sausalito. It was a nicely decorated room with a cozy feel. She had large fluffy pillows and a colorful down comforter. There was light from a window and a skylight, giving it a warm soft glow. Her boyfriend had his own room nearby. He was friendly at first, but that changed when she asked me to stay over and we started to make love.

Our lovemaking was full of passion and heat. She had strong vaginal muscles that would almost milk my penis. But she would often not come herself. I would go down on her and that seemed to be the only way she could really come. Her breasts were almost flat and later I realized that she was very sensitive about that.