The Free-Sex Movement

As they do at countless collegiate parties everywhere, the couples wriggled to the watusi and gyrated to the jerk, while recorded drums and saxophones resounded in the dimly lit apartment of a University of California student in Berkeley. Unlike parties most anywhere, however, the boys and girls were naked. After a while some of the couples drifted into bedrooms. Some embraced in darkened corners.

First it was free speech, then filthy speech. Now it is free love, as students, former students and nonstudents continue to test the limits of the permissible at Berkeley. There have been at least six such orgies, attended by between 20 and 45 youths each, in the San Francisco Bay area in the past month. All have been held in private residences. Most have included students from Cal and from San Francisco State.

The promoters of nude parties contend that their motivation is intellectual and philosophical, not merely sensual. Nonstudent Richard Thome, 29, a Negro who heads an off-campus East Bay Sexual Freedom League, argues that "man will only become free when he can overcome his own guilt and when society stops trying to manage his sex life for him." His idea of freedom is parties in which individuals can engage in any sexual act "that doesn't impose on the desire of other people."

Not Everything Goes. On campus, the approach is somewhat different. At Berkeley, 30 "card-carrying members" of the University of California Sexual Freedom Forum man one of the many campus propaganda tables, where they sell buttons reading TAKE IT OFF and I'M WILLING IF YOU ARE. They distribute pamphlets on birth control, abortion and venereal disease, have lectured on these subjects with university approval. University officials turned down as "educationally irrelevant" the group's request to show a nudist movie. "I reject the notion that anything goes on this campus," said Berkeley Chancellor Roger Heyns. "I seriously doubt that this is a violation of anyone's freedom."

The president of the campus group, Sociology Freshman Kurt Rust, argues that the only test of sexual conduct should be: "Do I want to do it? Does it hurt anyone else?" The group's secretary, Psychology Student Holly Tannen, a bright 18-year-old who enrolled at Cal at 16, contends that suppressing sexual expression leads to "pornography and topless night clubs." She concedes she was embarrassed at her first nude party. "I was ashamed of my body," she said. "But I got over that."

Naked Wade-In. The free-sex movement has been growing slowly in various parts of the country since March 1964, when Dr. Leo Koch, a biology teacher who in 1960 was fired by the University of Illinois for advocating premarital sex, and Jefferson Poland, a restless student who says he is studying to be "either a lawyer or an agitator," founded the New York City League for Sexual Freedom. Poland, who now attends Merritt Junior College in Oakland, took the offensive for nudism by wading naked into the ocean at San Francisco's Aquatic Park last August with two beefy members of the off-campus San Francisco Sexual Freedom League, Ina Saslow and Shirley Einsiedel. All were arrested. The girls got suspended sentences, and Poland was sent to jail for five weekends.

Since then, in less sensational form, student committees promoting sexual freedom have been organized at Stanford, the University of Texas and U.C.L.A. Mainly they demand that college health services provide contraceptives to any students desiring them, and insist that sexual conduct in private is strictly a personal matter not to be regulated by schools or laws. In Austin, The Texas Student League for Responsible Sexual Freedom has 18 members so far, led by Senior Tom Maddux. He contends that limiting birth control pills to married women is "ridiculous," society's attitude toward homosexuality is "hypocritical," and laws against sodomy should be "stricken or radically changed."

Uninterested Majority. The Stanford group, called the Sexual Rights Forum, has secured 450 student signatures in a drive for a campus referendum on whether the health service should be "authorized to prescribe contraceptives to any student desiring them." It expects to get the necessary 600 petitioners, although the referendum would not be binding on the university. Forum Leader James Ayre, a graduate student in mineral engineering, argues that "any discrimination by the health service on the basis of marital status in prescribing contraceptives implies a moral judgment on premarital intercourse." Stanford Health Center Director Maurice Osborne has rejected the group's arguments as "a tragically crude and simplistic approach to an enormously complex and sensitive issue." Widespread distribution of contraceptives, he says, "might reinforce existing pressures that already urge premarital intercourse."

As in most other campus protests, the great majority of students seems either uninterested in or scornful of the sexual-freedom movement. Stanford Junior Suzanne Lefranc condemns the Forum for "turning sex into a personal joke--selling lapel buttons with snickering slogans." And Berkeley's Jerry Goldstein, president of the campus student government, calls it all "so absurd that I don't think students are paying attention to it." As for any legal action against licentiousness at house parties, Berkeley Police Chief Addison Fording contends that he cannot arrest anyone unless someone present files a complaint.

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