The Dark Sexual Revolution of May '68

The intellectuals who inspired the student riots in Paris in '68 also inspired the gay rights movement and the pioneers of Queer Theory. They bequeathed to both a startling attitude to child abuse.

If we are to believe variously noisy and relentless movements from BLM and Extinction Rebellion on the Left to Trumpian conspirators on the Right or the LGBTQ+ lobby for that matter….Western society, that apparently uniquely evil creation of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy, is spiralling towards ever-increasing hatred, violence and destruction. You’ve never had it so bad could be their shared motto.

These movements and others have different origins but they share something universal: they excoriate our imperfect present while proposing solutions for a future world that are untried, untested and dangerously “utopian”. Who else but a person in the grip of a utopian delusion could consider housing male sex offenders in women’s prisons for example?

I’m looking at the history of the LGBTQ+ movement because for me, as a gay man, it feels particularly inexplicable that a society that has enshrined the rights of trans as well as gay people in law in ways that even three decades ago would have seemed little short of miraculous, is presented now by this lobby as a hellish whirpool of bigotry. Perhaps if we can trace where this reflex attitude of misery about the present and unthinking yearning for an unrealisable future comes from we can cure its neurosis.

To do that we have to try to pitch ourselves back in time to the inception of the movement that has morphed into the LGBTQ+ lobby. I talked about Marxism and neo-Marxism in my last post, but the appeal the Far Left had to so many young gay and trans pioneers wasn’t so much in the nitty gritty of Marxist-Leninist thought….as the promise of something utopian.

Let’s go back to the run-up to the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969, which most observers agree marks the birth of the lobby that now calls itself the LGBTQ+ movement. To say this was a time of protest is understatement. As a front cover from the New York Review of Books from that year suggests.

Richard Nixon had taken power in January that year after his successful election victory the previous November. Bobby Seale was in jail on trumped up charges after the Black Panthers protested at the Democratic National convention. During his trial the judge had ordered him bound and gagged because of objections to his personal lack of legal representation. Top class PR for the American justice system

And on the cover there was that man ….we talked about last time …Wilhelm Reich yet again. You’d be forgiven for thinking that his death in jail in 1957 after fraudulently marketing his ridiculous ‘organon accumulator’ sex machine might have destroyed Reich’s reputation but nothing could be further from the truth. In 1969 Reich’s vision continued to appeal: if people could have more and better orgasms they’d be individually much healthier -both mentally and physically- and they’d undermine authoritarianism. Reich had invented the term ‘sexual revolution’…and no one could now deny America and the West was in the midst of exactly that, and had been now for some time.

In 1964 so great was Reich’s popularity that Time suggested “for now it seems America is one big Orgone box”.

There was criticism of course.

In that 1969 New York Review article, the psychiatrist Charles Rycroft (from the Tavistock no less) pointed out the orgasms Reich seemed so obsessed with tended to have more give and less take in the phallocentric department. His widow also pointed out he’d been absurdly Victorian and hypocritical, having affairs of his own but “I almost had to take an oath of fidelity before he’d be satisfied”. Quelle surprise.

There was also ridicule.

In the 1968 film ‘Barbarella’ the evil doctor Durand Durand locks the impossibly beautiful Jane Fonda in an ….orgasm machine. She overwhelms it with orgasmic power and breaks it. Of course she does. Durand Durand inspired the name for a certain British band, which is so very Reichian. Even when he’s being criticised the idea of more orgasms strikes most guys as a thoroughly good thing.

Reich is important because although he had been a passionate young Marxist and was widely thought still to be one because his best seller The Mass Psychology of Fascism was written while he was one, by the time of his death he loathed everything on the left. So why was he on the rise again by the end of the decade? It’s all to do with Paris and May 1968 where he became one of the key intellectual influences.

Apart from the inherent appeal of more and better orgasms, Reich supplied something that young people were yearning for: utopian gurus. And no offer from a prospective guru was too bonkers. 1968 had begun with the Beatles heading to India to seek enlightenment from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

One of the proofs of his great spiritual revelation of err…the power of Transcendental Meditation was ‘yogic flying’. Adherents claimed to be able to lift themselves off the ground by the power of meditation though critics (and anyone with an iota of common sense) tended to see such ‘flying’ as rather ridiculous hopping. Feast your eyes on this nonsense.

1968 was a great year for Bozo the clown, who was, it seems, constantly on tour.

The same year a book by anthropology student Carlos Castaneda became a huge best-seller. The Teachings of Don Juan was supposed to have been narrated to the young undergraduate by a shaman while under the influence of Mexican peyote.

UCLA awarded Castaneda a PhD on the basis of this recitation from a shamanic figure who appeared and disappeared mysteriously. This was despite the fact experts pointed out Don Juan had used the wrong terms and completely misunderstood the rituals of theYaqui tribe he claimed to hail from.

After he was exposed as a fraud in the mid 70s by Richard de Mille (the nephew of Cecil B De Mille who raised him as his own son) Castaneda became the leader of a secretive sex cult whose adherents believed they were in contact with the same superbeing aliens who’d communicated ancient wisdom to shamans like Don Juan. Castaneda slept with all the leading figures in his cult who, for some strange reason, were all young woman. He regulated everything about their lives, including the length of their pubic hair.

After his death the receipts from the sales of Castaneda’s books funded a company called ClearGreen, who will still take your money if you want to learn ‘magical’ dancing that connects us to the universe and reveals the human body as a luminous ball of energy. Or something.

1968 also saw the publication of Erich von Daniken’s ‘Chariots of the Gods?’. The title would eventually lose the question but not the silliness.

This then was 1968. Gurus, fakes, and intoxicating ideas. I hope you’ve got my point: 1968…was nuts. And it was partly so nuts because the public was in the market for it. The stranger the better. Talking of which let’s go to Paris.

In the closing months of 1967, six months before the French capital was engulfed in violence. a young student by the name of Daniel Cohn-Bendit participated in fitful protests against the University of Nanterre, on the Western fringes of the city. Cohn-Bendit had read both Marcuse and Reich….but it was Wilhelm who captured his young soul.