We Are the One: Subcultural Politics and Leisure in Early San Francisco Punk

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which politics and leisure were entangled in early San Francisco punk. Although San Francisco is perhaps uniquely associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, the city was, by the late 1970s, also home to a punk scene largely defined by its fierce engagement with political issues. At the same time, punks experienced this scene — which existed at a time of sustained national, state, and local crisis — as deliriously fun. Their idea of fun was vastly different than mainstream ideas of American leisure, but there is no denying that punk, like most subcultures, was experienced at least in part as a leisure activity. I argue that punks acted deliberately to not only intertwine fun and politics, but to make fun and play vehicles for political struggle, if not revolution. At least in this one major American city, punk was equal parts political engagement and diversion, equally confrontational and escapist. More importantly, the leisure and fun elements contributed to the building of a prefigurative community as a micro-model of what punks hoped could be achieved on a larger scale. In that way, fun and politics contributed to a fundamentally utopian vision in a subculture marked not by nihilism — as punk is so often cast — but by possibility.