The 60s brought hippies, communes and free love in the United States. It also brought sexual openness to the teenage and young adult community. Open discussion of sex, premarital sex and drugs became more prominent and more frequently encountered upon among teenagers.
And so the Sexual Revolution was born.
This mindset of sexual openness and provocativeness hasn’t completely left our culture, but in fact has led to the recognition of more movements, such as the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Movement, which is still under wraps in our day.
Similar to the older generation’s disapproval with today’s sexual culture, parents’ of teenagers in the 1960s were in shock to see the “scandalous” incidents in the youth generations taking place when only a decade ago, conservative values held firm.
And although the generations above were horrified by new ideals, these redefined freedoms could not be pulled back.
“The idea of being partnered with one person only after marriage until death do you part was thrown out the window, “ Health teacher Ruth Kuzmanic said. “It was more free love, free sex, which was closely tied to LSD popularity at the concert scene. There was a lack in worries and consequences. The music, the contraception and the [ideals] all combust together to encourage the ‘let’s be more sexual’.”
So what prompted this drastic change in Sexual Revolution? It could have been the increased drug use of LSD and marijuana at concert scenes, but the most impacting answer: Legalization of the birth control pill in 1960.
“1960 is really your marking point with the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval of the birth control pill,” Social Studies teacher Jane Thompson said. “What that is going to do is offer women a tremendous amount of freedom regarding who they have sex with and how many partners they have before marriage.”
Just the allowance of a small contraceptive pill, smaller than your toenail, exploded into a domino effect on the wild actions and freedoms that teenagers explored. Sexual openness, acceptance and activity increased the following decade with the controversial Summer of 1967, a social experiment with the gathering of 100,000 people in San Francisco to celebrate alternative lifestyles which included free love and communal living.
Over the next few decades an influx of reactions wavering between embracement of sexuality and retraction of free love flooded the nation.
“There’s a rubber band effect or pendulum swing of mid to late 60s on,” Thompson said. “There’s a huge contraction of blatant sexual activity in the 1980s because of the proliferation of Sexual Transmitted Diseases. The AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome] epidemic had a huge tremendous effect on that.”
However, even since the 1980s, much development has taken place to subdue the absolute “death sentence of AIDS,” which is no longer the case due to the “medical community and medicine that has kept up with and combatted many STDs.”
No matter what pendulum swing our society is riding on, the freedom of sexual choices still hold truth in our society. The extreme extent of these sexual actions of people in the sixties is questionable in today’s society, but the mindset of modern day people are no doubt still influenced by the 1960s movements and has carried onto sexual social movements in our nation.
Selected states have been legalizing gay marriage and increasing the rights of the LGBT community for the last decade when Massachusetts was the first to allow same-sex marriage in 2004.
Recently on Nov. Governor Pat Quinn signed a bill approving Illinois to be the sixteenth state with legalized same-sex marriage. In the Congress, Illinois only narrowly passed the bill 61-54-2, only one above the 60 needed in the House of Representatives and passed 32-29 in the Senate, two votes above the needed.
Junior John Trowbridge, co-president of the Gay Straight Alliance at Central, does not see the narrow win as a letdown but sees this as a half-full cup step to general acceptance of the LGBT community.
“[LGBT] is becoming more widely accepted in that more and more people are coming out,” Trowbridge said. “More people are realizing that they are not a very small minority. These are people we know in our school and community. And the more that this happens, the more people will relate to being open about the topic even it’s not personal to them.”
Trowbridge believes the approval in the state government of gay marriage reflects the mindset of our state as well as our high school.
‘The state government had to have a majority of [representatives] to get it through,” Trowbridge said. “So it shows majority of people in the Illinois does accept same-sex marriage.”
The growth of support for sexual openness and differing sexuality has become increasingly publicized over the past few decades. The pendulum swing rocking between acceptance and contraction has carried on for decades, so the future is still questionable of how our society tackles sexuality as we grow.
