No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980

Preface

xi I was born in San Francisco in 1970, and my parents were activists in the New Left, antiwar, and feminist movements of the era. Their activism provides the backdrop for my earliest childhood memories: playing with toys in the back office of the bookstore where my father helped edit a radical journal; holding my mother’s hand at protest rallies where people spoke passionately about things that I could not understand; reading feminist fairy tales that celebrated princesses for their independence and smarts; and enjoying the excited bustle within our home, where my parents’ friends lavished me with affection as they talked politics. Because I was so young at the time, the people in my parents’ community seemed very old to me, but now that I am past their age, I can recognize them for who they were: young men and women who had come to California hoping to start a new life, not only for themselves but for the whole society. Many years later, walking down the street on a sunny San Francisco hillside, an old friend of my mother’s turned to me and said from out of the blue: “You have to understand. When your parents and I first came here, we thought that a revolution was coming very soon, within a few years.” By the time I was an adolescent, the world had both changed and not changed in the wake of my parents’ generation’s activism. On the one hand, the girls at my high school worried about their appearance and their popularity with boys, but on the other hand, they excelled at organic chemistry and physics, won trophies in competitive sports, and excitedly planned to attend the best universities where they went on to embark on illustrious careers. Gay teenagers who once would have hidden their sexuality came out to their classmates and were accepted by them. The students at my school formed organizations committed to nuclear disarmament and volunteered for Amnesty International. Yet when I shifted my gaze beyond the San Francisco Bay Area, the picture became more complicated. By the mid-1980s, Wall Street power brokers and air force fighter pilots were celebrated icons, Reagan was at the height of his popularity, and his administration was presiding over the dismantling of social welfare programs and a redistribution of wealth that hurt poor and working-class people. As my friends and I walked through San Francisco’s beautiful streets, we noticed homeless people begging for money, food, and shelter. Every time we p r e f a c e p r e f a c e xii passed a hospital, we knew that inside were gay men dying. The society had indeed changed, but not in the way my parents had in mind. This book emerges out of my attempts—first personal and later scholarly —to explain the contradictions that shaped my own upbringing: the contradiction between how much my parents’ activism had transformed American culture and how little it had altered American politics; the gulf between my native San Francisco, where most people embraced the transformations unleashed by the 1960s, and other parts of the country, where those transformations remained contested; the contradiction between the warmth and affection that I associated with the radical activists of my childhood and my dim awareness that there were people who were very angry at them; and, finally, the contradiction between my earliest childhood memories , populated by people who believed that history was on their side, and my adolescence, when the same people watched the Reagan Revolution with confusion and sorrow. I have finished this book, but many of the questions that compelled me to write it remain open. I do not know all of the reasons why San Francisco moved in one direction after 1968, while so many other cities, towns, and communities moved in another. I do not fully understand the rupture that occurred during these years in the lives of people like my parents. Nor have I determined how the activists of my childhood could have achieved so much yet fallen so short. No single book can possibly answer all of these questions. This book simply offers one place to begin the search: the early years of the 1970s, when nation and family collided, broke apart, and came back together in ways that helped create the political world we now inhabit. No Direction Home This page intentionally left blank...