PARTISAN REVIEW
69
one, rather than a tribal rite) and express that change in their inde–
pendence, their lack of moral remorse over sexual contacts and their
demand for an end to male chauvinism. But what produces this trans–
formation in the appreciation of the uses of sex is the creation, for the
first time, of a viable, alternative life style for the young. That life
style - represented at its best by the communes, the informal, colorful
dress, the communalistic manners, the Movement - provides political,
overtly nonsexual channels for adolescent resistence to adult authority
and values, giving them a shared body of belief (leftist) and history
which enables them to free themselves from the straight life. One does
not have to go his old man's way. There is another way, and that, with
all its many sexual, social, generational nuances, is carried in the word
revolution. Revolution, the alternative life style, will, I think, prevent
assimilation
in
five or ten years of the radical teen-agers into the straight
community. They cannot be bought anymore.
I have often wondered why it is that the image of the high school
radicals is so inaccurate - most American adults think of them as being
identified with the hippies, drugs, perverse sex practices, rock. The
reason, I suspect, is that most of the young men who write about the
scene (a boring word) , people like Mike
J
ahn, Richard Goldstein,
James Kunen, Richard Lorber, are my age, writers who carne out of the
worlds of rock criticism and radical
college
politics but who are rapidly
losing touch with the kids. So you try to make them into what you
were at their age, you want them to be as excited about Elvis and the
return of Jerry Lee Lewis, your past, excited about drugs and sex as
you were once, and in the process of gilding the young kids with your
nostalgia you unconsciously miss their jadedness, their privateness and,
with a face rarely shown to anyone outside their community, their
gentleness.
Pigcity. Chicago. Richard Daley's empire. Southside, in the black
ghetto, the territory with the highest crime rate and the most corrupt
police, the place where Daley's party henchmen work hand-in-glove with
the Brotherhood to rob through numbers and junk; there, in a tenement
near the Dan Ryan Expressway, I visited a black girl named Thelma,
who had spent the summer working in a free school, run by the Black
Panthers, which educated grammar schaol youngsters in black pride and
socialism. Thelma is sixteen years old and her personal history is, in a
way, the history of her race in America. Deprivation. At thirteen Thelma
was raped in a vacant lot one block from her home. She has a long
history of political activism, participation in two Southside racial disor-
