On November 15, 1966, five police officers entered the Psychedelic Shop, in San Francisco, and purchased a thin volume of poetry, “The Love Book,” for a dollar. This sequence of erotic poems celebrating a woman’s sexual pleasure was by the Beat poet Lenore Kandel. As soon as the money exchanged hands, the deputy arrested the clerk for selling obscene material. The officers then confiscated copies of the book, detained and frisked customers, and put out a warrant for the store owner, who was jailed the next day. Then they headed across town to City Lights Booksellers, which also sold “The Love Book.” A decade earlier, in 1957, the police had impounded Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” at City Lights and arrested the bookseller for peddling pornography. Now history repeated itself as the cops seized Kandel’s poetry and took the clerk into custody. What followed was San Francisco’s last, and longest, obscenity trial over a literary work, and the only one featuring a female writer.
Even as these arrests were happening, people were puzzled by the decision to target “The Love Book.” Although Kandel used plenty of four-letter words—a cycle of poems was titled “To Fuck with Love”—there was more salacious material around San Francisco. But Kandel was the victim of bad timing. Much like today’s challenged books—such as “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe, or “Lawn Boy,” by Jonathan Evison—her work contains elements that some conservative factions felt threatened mainstream morality. The week before “The Love Book” was impounded, Ronald Reagan was elected California governor. He campaigned on a platform to crack down on the burgeoning counterculture, vowing that he would “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” meaning student protests at the university, and warning of “sexual orgies so vile, I cannot describe them to you.” Kandel was a part of both the Beat-poetry scene and the hippie movement that would soon peak in 1967’s Summer of Love. Her poems express unabashed enjoyment of sex at a time when women weren’t supposed to acknowledge such feelings in public. In “The Love Book,” Kandel writes with openness and psychedelic-tinged joy, revelling in orgasmic pleasure. “All of me / can help but shriek / YES YES YES this is what I wanted this / beautiful.” Lines about arousal, such as “my body / transforms into one enormous mouth / between my legs,” suggest the shameless experiences of a sexually liberated woman. On top of that, her belief in sex as a spiritual act and a form of worship further menaced traditional values.
