Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'roll

[Paul Nightingale]

Moya Luckett & Hilary Radner (1999) Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality
in the 1960s, University of Minnesota Press

On Eldridge Cleaver and the counterculture ...

"Cleaver was at the forefront of promoting such cross-racial alliances with
whites. In his most famous essay to that effect, 'The White Race and Its
Heroes,' Cleaver argues that white youth in America had come to abandon
their identification with the white father figures of the past and praises
them for making what he perceives as common cause with the global revolt of
Third World peoples against Western imperialism.

[...]  

"The experience that he refers to with the Peace and Freedom Party, however,
reveals a remarkable fact about exactly which whites Cleaver was most
interested in building an alliance with. In 1968, after the newly formed
Peace and Freedom Party had nominated him (over Dick Gregory) as its
presidential candidate, Cleaver outraged those attending the party
convention by insisting that they select as his running mate not one of
their own 'straight' left-wing politicos, but Yippie celebrity Jerry Rubin.
Cleaver's interest in young white allies consistently centered not on pure
political activists, but rather on politically inclined countercultural
types associated with 'sex, drugs, and rock and roll.' Cleaver, in this
respect, took his affirmation of white youth one step further than any of
his fellow Panthers." (137)

Not conclusive; the phrase might or might not be a direct quotation from
Cleaver. Elsewhere in this passage there are quotations from Marty Jezer
(1992) Abbie Hoffman, American Rebel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press), which I don't have access to.

However, on the next page Luckett & Radner quote do Cleaver, in Soul on Ice:

"The characteristic of the white rebels which most alarms their elders--the
long hair, the new dances, their love for Negro music, their use of
marijuana, their mystical attitude toward sex--are all tools of their
rebellion. They have turned these tools against the totalitarian fabric of
American society--and they mean to change it." (138 in SS, 77 in SoI)

Again inconclusive, but ...

And if nothing else it brings to mind a novel beginning on a summer's day in
1984.