The Summer of Love was a major social phenomenon that occurred in San Francisco during the summer of 1967. As many as 100,000 people, mostly young people, hippies, beatniks, and 1960s counterculture figures, converged in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park. More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed hippie culture, spiritual awakening, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war sentiment, and free love throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City. An episode of the PBS documentary series American Experience referred to the Summer of Love as "the largest migration of young people in the history of America".
The Diggers were a radical community-action group of activists and street theatre actors operating from 1966 to 1968, based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Their politics have been categorized as "left-wing;" more accurately, they were "community anarchists" who blended a desire for freedom with a consciousness of the community in which they lived. The Diggers' central tenet was to be "authentic," seeking to create a society free from the dictates of money and capitalism.
The Human Be-In was an event held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Polo Fields on January 14, 1967. It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a symbol of American counterculture and introduced the word "psychedelic" to suburbia.
Haight-Ashbury is a district of San Francisco, California, named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. It is also called the Haight and the Upper Haight. The neighborhood is known as one of the main centers of the counterculture of the 1960s.
A free clinic or walk in clinic is a health care facility in the United States offering services to economically disadvantaged individuals for free or at a nominal cost. The need for such a clinic arises in societies where there is no universal healthcare, and therefore a social safety net has arisen in its place. Core staff members may hold full-time paid positions, however, most of the staff a patient will encounter are volunteers drawn from the local medical community.
The San Francisco sound refers to rock music performed live and recorded by San Francisco-based rock groups of the mid-1960s to early 1970s. It was associated with the counterculture community in San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district, during these years. San Francisco is a westward-looking port city, a city that at the time was 'big enough' but not manic like New York City or spread out like Los Angeles. Hence, it could support a 'scene'. According to journalist Ed Vulliamy, "A core of Haight Ashbury bands played with each other, for each other"
Margaret Jean "Margo" St. James was an American sex worker and sex-positive feminist. In San Francisco, she founded COYOTE, an organization advocating decriminalization of prostitution, and co-founded the St. James Infirmary Clinic, a medical and social service organization serving sex workers in the Tenderloin.
Leonard Wolf was a Romanian-American poet, author, teacher, and translator. He is known for his authoritative annotated editions of classic gothic horror novels, including Dracula, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Phantom of the Opera, and other critical works on the topic; and also for his Yiddish translations of works ranging from those of Isaac Bashevis Singer to Winnie-the-Pooh. He is the father of Naomi Wolf.
The hippie subculture began its development as a youth movement in the United States during the early 1960s and then developed around the world.
Marcus Augustine Conant is an American dermatologist and one of the first physicians to diagnose and treat Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in 1981. He helped create one of the largest private AIDS clinics, was a founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and his work contributed to development of some of today's top HIV medications. He has written over 70 publications on the treatment of AIDS.
John Harvey Frykman was a Lutheran minister and American psychotherapist specializing in brief therapy, medical hypnosis and family therapy. He was the founding director of the drug treatment program of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco, California, and is noted for his problem solving, individualized approach to substance abuse therapy and solution focused brief therapy.
During the "hippie" period 1967–1968 in San Francisco, an individual named Al Rinker started an organization located at 1830 Fell St in the city's Haight Ashbury district called the Switchboard. Its purpose was to act as a social switchboard for people living there.
Eric Goosby is an American public health official, currently serving as Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health Delivery, Diplomacy and Economics, Institute for Global Health Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Goosby previously served as the UN Special Envoy on Tuberculosis as well as previously served as the United States Global AIDS Coordinator from 2009 until mid-November 2013. In the role, Goosby directed the U.S. strategy for addressing HIV around the world and led President Obama's implementation of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Goosby was sworn in during June 2009 and resigned in November 2013, taking a position as a professor at UCSF, where he directs the Center for Global Health Delivery and Diplomacy, a collaboration between UCSF and the University of California, Berkeley.
Flash Gordon is a practicing primary care physician in Greenbrae, California, who has been described as the premier physician and medical spokesperson for the motorcyclist community in the US. He has written two books on motorcycling medicine: Blood, Sweat & Gears (1995) and Blood, Sweat & 2nd Gear (2008), and was a contributing columnist for Motorcycle Consumer News magazine, as well as San Francisco's monthly CityBike.
The Mantra-Rock Dance was a counterculture music event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public. It was also a promotional and fundraising effort for their first center on the West Coast of the United States.
Darryl S. Inaba is an American pharmacist who is the remaining owner and President of CNS Productions, Inc. in Medford, OR. He is an associate professor of Pharmacology at the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, California, and the Director of Clinical and Behavioral Health Services at ARC in Medford, Oregon. He is also special consultant and instructor for the University of Utah School of Alcoholism and Other Drug Dependencies, as well as the Director of Education and Research at CNS Productions. Dr. Inaba is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, which has been published since 1967.
Richard Philip Usatine is a physician, photographer, writer, speaker, and professor of family and community medicine, dermatology and cutaneous surgery. He is Assistant Director of Medical Humanities Education at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
CNS Productions is a publisher of educational materials — primarily textbooks and instructional DVDs — dealing with psychoactive drugs and addiction. It was formed in 1983 by Paul Steinbroner, with long-time collaborator William E. Cohen who had an extensive background in medical film production. CNS Productions has produced and distributed over fifty separate titles on issues related to the neurobehavioral effects of psychoactive drugs.
Huckleberry House is a shelter for runaway and homeless youth located in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, California. Huckleberry House was the first runaway shelter for youth in the US, founded during the Summer of Love on June 18, 1967, by several churches and the San Francisco Foundation.
The San Francisco model of AIDS care began in 1983 in wards 86 and 5B of San Francisco General Hospital. The focus of this model was not only on the health of each patient with AIDS, but also on the well-being of each person. As AIDS was beginning to be treated as a significant epidemic, San Francisco General Hospital recognized the need to create new standards of care for a disease that had never before been experienced. Compassionate care has now become a priority worldwide and an expected standard in hospitals as there places a greater emphasis on the social, psychological, and economic aspects of treatment in addition to the medicine.
