PERHAPS THE GREATEST promise of May '68 arose with an eruption of spontaneity that, as it interrupted the dreary process of national politics, suggested it might indeed be possible to live differently. But could this difference arise over the course of time without the tempestuous cycle of action and reaction? For when the barricades were dismantled, the fabric of daily life remained largely unchanged. As Dutch Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder said of his postwar generation in a 2005 interview with the Los Angeles-based magazine Tease, "Our upbringing was death. Father was the boss. Strict rules. The word 'sex' alone was enough to give you a red face." Not surprisingly, then, after 1968 the word liberation would have to migrate from a term used to describe anticolonial struggles to include almost all aspects of daily life. In the ensuing half decade, sexuality became central to these investigations, as it was seen less as a key to the individual psyche than as a line of flight from the inevitable "productive" boredom of monogamous hetero life. "Liberated" sexuality was a means of disrupting the social order, of rearranging the power dynamic at the heart of the nuclear family and forging new forms of alliance.

Reflecting this emerging perspective were a number of publications, from grassroots to academic, that began in the late 1960s. Perhaps the most daring among these was the Amsterdam-based underground newspaper Suck--The First European Sex Paper, of which De Ridder was one of the publishers. Founded in London in 1969 by veteran underground publishers Jim Haynes and Bill Levy, Heathcote Williams, Jean Shrimpton, and Germaine Greer, Suck celebrated hippie free love and gay and lesbian sex as nonprivatized forms of sexuality, a way of transporting people from the confines of the self into new, shared realms of pleasure and friendship. Immediately after its creation, the magazine moved its production to Amsterdam to circumvent English censorship and obscenity laws. (De Ridder, who was already involved with the Fluxus-influenced underground magazine Image Storm, became the copublisher at that time.)

Over the course of the publication's intermittent production until 1974, the editorial group's location rotated among cities in Europe and the United States, during short, intense periods when the group lived together; Suck also produced the Wet Dream Film Festival of banned erotic and pornographic films in Amsterdam, which took place in 1970 and 1971, and published a book (Wet Dreams: Films and Adventures) commemorating the festivals in 1973. "Everyone was lovely," Williams recalls of the era in Haynes's 1984 autobiography, Thanks for Coming! "Suddenly the vision of everyone Coming Together could only be physical ... no longer intellectual. The sex politics of Reich, the belief of Auden that we must love one another or die, the holy orgiastics of Willie Blake, God's Rake, had to burst through.... Suck was a display of pantheistic and revolutionary Schtupping. You cannot fuck everyone in the world, but at least you can try." As Suck lore has it, the magazine's first editorial meeting took place...