Countercultural Highlight: Two Summers of Love?

Hey there! Welcome to my first countercultural history highlight post! This marks the beginning of a new series of content I will be releasing every other week on Wednesdays. As today is my promised day of return, however, this one is the exception to that rule. Thanks for your patience through all of these updates and I hope you'll stick around!

Ah, the Summer of Love. Most of us have heard of it, but many aren't sure of the specifics. Kicking off our first countercultural history highlight with the anniversary of this historical phenomenon's start, let's get into it!

Fantasy Fair & Magic Mountain Festival, June 1967,
via realsanfranciscotours

One of the biggest myths surrounding the Summer of Love is the year. Commonly thought to have taken place in 1969 due to the year's significant contributions to 60s and early 70s counterculture, as well as an unofficial form of the historic get-together that was staged that year. The real deal actually took place in 1967 in the San Francisco district of Haight-Ashbury, when an estimate of 100,000 hippies gathered there. High schoolers, college students, and other youth began to funnel into the area from spring break to the start of summer vacation, bringing massive amounts of attention from the media to the hippie movement from all over America. Former San Francisco mayor John F. Shelley and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, determined to stop the influx of hippies rushing to the area, also accidentally aided in bringing attention to the scene. 

These gatherings, called Love-ins (a term coined by comedian and radio personality Peter Bergman), were focused around things like love, music, meditation, sex, and often, recreational drug use (especially marijuana and LSD). They would include live bands and were said to function like "a great big picnic" according to love-in organizer Jim Vance.

An unofficial Summer of Love took place in New Orleans in 1969, where they had their own set of weekly love-ins staged by Vance, a man who is described as "bearded, barefoot, and bare-chested." He had helped to stage the ones in San Francisco and and New York beforehand and was a fairly well known figure within hippie circles. However, he couldn't stay after the first gathering in New Orleans as the cops were after him (he was wanted on charges of drug possession) and they continued without him every following Sunday for the rest of the summer.