Absolutely. But the San Franciso Bay Area really was different from
much of the rest of the country. Many people considered to be
"straight" there in the 1960s would have been considered hippies, and/or
flaming political radicals, in much of the rest of the US. In much of
the rest of the US, all you had to do to be considered a "hippie" was
wear frayed bellbottom jeans in public, and/or be a male with long hair
and/or a beard.
Take my husband, who grew up in Berkeley and got his BA at UC Berkeley.
He was a (punch) card-carrying nerd, computer geek, programmer-for-pay
at 15 when hardly anyone was a programmer at that age (there were no
personal computers). Being a nerd was not "cool." Nerds were always
straight, pimply weedy guys facing what everyone else regarded as
dismally dull futures at places like, horrors, IBM. Just the same, he
did the things straight teenagers and young adults were doing in
Berkeley, which included the usual clouds of smoke in public places,
political demonstrations on campus, enduring pepper gassing of same,
growing a beard, and so on.
Fran
Lavolta Press
http://www.lavoltapress.com
It's my understanding that a little of each of these last two are
true. (As for the hippie connection, there's often an assumption that
anyone at Berkley in the late 60s must have been a hippie, but that's
not necessarily true. I suspect that hippie-ness, like most things,
existed on a spectrum).
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