New York: Breaking Point, 1967. 6 ¼ x 7 ½ in. Offset. Saddle-stapled in green wraps. 60 pp. Very good. Item #5491

A 1967 edition of the anti-hippie diatribe attacking the “Gangsters of New Freedom” on various fronts. Legman was a scholar and folklorist who dedicated his life to the study of erotica, but was vehemently opposed to the propagation of violence in the media, the spread of drug usage in the 1960s, the seeming directionlessness of the politics of youth culture, and the corruption of adolescents. He worked for the bookseller Jacob Brussel early in his career and later was a book scout for the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

Legman claimed to have invented the phrase “Make Love, Not War” in a 1963 speech, though he argued against its later usage. Scholarship differs on Legman’s sexuality: some have suggested that he was privately homosexual and perhaps even the inventor of the vibrator, and others believe him to be a heterosexual homophobe. He lived the later part of life in France, having fled censorship and legal issues with the United States Postal Service.

“New Freedom magazines and newspapers will publish the word ‘shit’ more than the word ‘Communism’ indicating exactly what the newly-advertised New Left is composed of...The Fake Revolt was scared into existence by the McCarthyism of the 1950’s. It cannot come out for anything radical without going to jails, so it has come out for Nothing...In the end, a hippie or a beatnik is a frantically self-advertising coward and parasite, all tired and ‘beaten’ by a struggle in which he somehow never engaged.”

A strange and important reading of the hippie counterculture and the movement’s failures from one of the 20th century’s leading scholars of erotica.

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