Sunday, August 23, 2026
Via Be Here Now Network. \\\\ Alan Watts – Being in the Way – Ep. 41 – The Web of Life
Alan Watts – Being in the Way – Ep. 41 – The Web of Life
Alan Watts reveals the harmony of embracing our human role while also recognizing that we are the entire cosmos. Today’s episode is brought to...
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation \\\ Words of Wisdom - August 23, 2026 🌻
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Via Daily Dharma: Let Go of Pain
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Via FB \\ Bil Browning
In August 1965, three people walked into the water at San Francisco’s Aquatic Park, took off their clothes, and turned a day at the beach into a civil liberties fight.
Police arrested all three.
Jefferson Poland, Ina Saslow, and Shirley Einsiedel were activists with San Francisco’s burgeoning sexual freedom movement. Their “nude wade-in” sounds almost quaint now, but their target was much bigger than whether somebody could skinny-dip in public.
They were attacking the government’s power to police sex, bodies, and private life.
The League for Sexual Freedom had emerged from a loose network of radicals who were unusually willing to connect causes that other organizations often kept separate. They opposed censorship and anti-nudity laws. They wanted abortion restrictions repealed and prostitution decriminalized. They challenged police harassment of homosexuals and laws criminalizing consensual sex.
In 1964, the lesbian magazine "The Ladder" reported that the San Francisco League considered sexual freedom “a fundamental civil liberty” and wanted California laws against what the state called sexual “perversions” repealed.
That was not cautious language in 1964.
This was a period when consensual sex between men could still get you arrested in California. Police routinely raided gay bars, entrapped gay men, and treated queer sexuality as probable cause. The government did not merely disapprove of queer sex. It had laws, cops, courts, and surveillance practices devoted to controlling it.
So the League made the body itself part of the protest.
Poland had already been pushing public nudity as civil disobedience. At Aquatic Park, he, Saslow, and Einsiedel stripped down and waded into San Francisco Bay. Police hauled them away. Saslow and Einsiedel received suspended sentences. Poland got five weekends in jail.
If the government claims authority over your body, put your body at the center of the argument.
The League was messy, radical, sexually libertarian, and sometimes deliberately provocative. It also pushed ideas that would become central to later queer politics: consensual sex should not make you a criminal. Homosexuality should not justify police harassment. The government should have limits on how deeply it can pry into your bedroom.
These activists weren’t asking to be respectable enough to escape punishment.
They were asking why consensual sexuality was the government’s business in the first place.
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