Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 2

Contents

Contents Foreword by Susan Brownmiller xi Preface by Ken Wachsberger xiii Soldiers Against the Vietnam War: Aboveground and The Ally Harry W. Haines, with appendices by Harry W. Haines and James Lewes 1 “Tell us about the plan to burn down barracks buildings at Fort Carson.” The army intelligence officer wasn’t keeping notes during the interrogation, so I figured the gray room had a microphone somewhere, recording my answers. My cover was blown, and here I sat in my dress uniform, summoned to explain my role in the publication of Aboveground, an antiwar paper directed at soldiers stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. Harry Haines looks back at the widespread GI antiwar movement, that largely hidden, secret part of the war’s history that embarrasses and threatens the regime that rules America today. Two appendices, by Haines and James Lewes, identify nearly 500 underground antiwar newspapers produced by, or aimed at, members of the U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War. Fast Times in the Motor City: The First Ten Years of the Fifth Estate, 1965–1975 Bob Hippler, with an appendix by Patrick Halley 47 Harvey Ovshinsky wasn’t happy when his mother moved to Los Angeles in 1965 and dragged along the popular senior from Detroit’s Mumford High School. Wandering around town in a funk, Ovshinsky happened upon the Sunset Strip. There he saw two sights that piqued his interest: a gathering place called the Fifth Estate Coffeehouse and Art Kunkin’s Los Angeles Free Press. Ovshinsky began hanging out at the coffeehouse and working on the Free Press. He was captivated by its antiwar politics, its concern for developing a radical Los Angeles community, and its coverage of the local music scene. Before the year was over, he returned to Detroit and founded Fifth Estate. Over forty years later, writes alumnus Bob Hippler, the snake oil of Reagan and the two Bushes has bankrupted the country, most workers do not have a union, and countries still suffer under the yoke of neocolonialism; but the public has rejected Bush II’s bogus “war on terror” and illegal occupation of Iraq, and Fifth Estate is the nation’s longest-lived underground paper to emerge from the Vietnam era. In an appendix, Patrick Halley tells how he infiltrated the “Divine Light Mission,” a religious cult started in India; how he pied the Guru Maharaj Ji, the fifteen-year-old perfect master, during the kid’s visit to Detroit to receive the key to the city; and about the steel plate he wore in his head as a reminder until he died. Fag Rag: The Most Loathsome Publication in the English Language Charley Shively 97 On Friday evening, June 27, 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Bar on Sheridan Square. Instead of going quietly into the waiting vans, the motley crowd of queers and queens attacked the police. Stonewall was closed, but sporadic street rioting continued in Greenwich Village for the next few days. The event quickly became the Bastille Day of an emergent, nationwide gay and lesbian liberation movement, and the inspiration for a whole network of Gay Liberation Front papers, including Boston’s Fag Rag. All of them offered a brisk brew of sexual liberation, anarchism, hippie love, drugs, peace, Maoism, Marxism, cultural separatism, feminism, effeminism, tofu/brown rice, urban junkie, rural purism, nudism, leather, high camp drag, poetry, essays, pictures, and more. In this article, Fag Rag collective member Charley Shively gives context to the paper’s history into the present by tracing the history of the gay press back to Paris and Chicago in the twenties. The Kudzu: Birth and Death in Underground Mississippi David Doggett 121 Yes, there was an underground press in Mississippi in the sixties. How could there not be writers in the land of Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and Eudora Welty? The paper was called The Kudzu after the notorious vine that grows over old sheds, trees, and telephone poles throughout the South. How did it come about that a bunch of Mississippi white kids, descended from rednecks, slave owners, and Bible-thumpers, published for four years in the state’s capital a running diatribe of social, economic, and political revolution, a proclamation of sexual liberation, illegal drugs, and heretical mysticism? How does anyone, anywhere, rise above the overpowering flow of one’s native culture, the suffocating vise-like grip of the familial and communal, birth-to-death universe view? David Doggett tackles these questions and...