ABSTRACT
Easter, 1967, Stinson Beach, California: Thirty or so artists, writers, poets, New Leftists, head-shop owners and hippies convene between the blue Pacific and the shade of Mount Tamalpais. It's the first national meeting of the underground press, papers that are intimate parts of dissident hippie-activist communities from Berkeley to the East Village. The organization votes to change its name from an Underground to an Alternative Press Syndicate. June 1998, Washington, D.C.: The underground press has receded. Being anti-censorship and pro-sex were other underground hallmarks. Profanity was a norm, to demystify language and lust, to freak out straight people, to ally with the toughest blood on the block. The alternative weeklies do maintain the community base, lifestyle orientation and point-of-view reporting of the undergrounds. The underground press's desire to include everybody in "making the revolution" liberated new views and energy. But it also came to categorize ability as "bourgeois" and "elitist".
