By Thanksgiving of 1967, we had no restrictions on when we could leave or return, no limitations on women or alcohol in the dorms. Alcohol was relegated to minor importance by then. Guys were openly smoking joints at parties and card games. All this change happened in a few weeks. I'll leave it up to sociologists and social historians to tell you why these things happened. The Vietnam war and the draft process, which required our involuntary participation in that war, were important catalysts, but it's too simplistic to try to establish a direct causality. The important thing is that freedom happened so suddenly, and we didn't know how to be free, so we went insane with drugs and sex and skipping classes and radical politics and playing cards all night, and whatever else we could think of.

I like to think that the most amazing thing about my generation was the speed at which we lost our innocence. My senior ball in 1966 was all white bucks and clean living. Two years later, everyone I knew was either in Vietnam, praying to come home, or taking drugs, praying not to go there. Guys who couldn't name the U.S President in 1967 had pictures of obscure. Latin American revolutionaries on their walls in 1968. Many of my old friends weren't talking to each other because of their divisions over America's role in Southeast Asia.

This cultural revolution started, albeit slowly, to affect the movie industry. The pragmatic businessmen in the industry started to view the new generation as an important target market, and realized that it was now possible to market virtually mainstream movies with new levels of sexual explicitness. But it takes time to make movies, so American businessmen started first to market some existing product - dreadful European films which had some sex and flesh in them (ala "I Am Curious, Yellow"), and then to fund new projects which would pander to those in our generation who wanted to stretch out our newly discovered wings. In this next wave came Therese and Isabelle, one of the first explicit movies to play in mainstream theaters to normal and "nice" suburban audiences.

There is just no way my prose can convey what it was like to go into a non-porn theater, the same theaters where our moms and dads had taken us to see "Old Yeller", and see scenes like this. They may seem conservative by later standards, but these were shocking to us as we emerged from our Howdy Doody years. Therese and Isabelle were two schoolgirls who began a love affair. The story is told with delicacy, and without sensationalism. Therese returns as an adult to her childhood academy, and relives the past in flashbacks as she walks around the school. There is even a scene with both women making passionate nice-nice. I was 18 or so when I saw this. Many of us did not know such things existed. I kinda sorta knew it existed, in theory, but I wasn't sure exactly what it entailed.

"Therese" was also one of the later B&W movies, made by the guy I like to think of us the world's most stylish pornographer, Radley Metzger. Radley could mimic the styles of the great European directors, and shot his films in lavish settings. He was also familiar with the artistic theories of the stage masters like Pirandello, and incorporated some of their concepts in his own work. More to the point, many of can thank Radley for our first real looks at T&A, and this movie was one of the first major films with nudity after the cultural revolution. I don't remember now if Metzger was trying to sell T&A by placing it in the context of a serious movie, or if he really thought he was Fellini and was just taking advantage of the new liberalism to tell his story more explicitly