Jefferson Poland

John Jefferson Poland (born July 12, 1942) is the founder of the Sexual Freedom League, and a registered sex offender.

Sexual Freedom League

In 1963, he founded the Sexual Freedom League in New York City with Leo Koch. He then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and focused his organizing efforts at the University of California, Berkeley. Poland founded various chapters, including ones in the East Bay, San Francisco, Berkeley and San Diego. However, he did not run these organizations himself; he would found them and then turn them over to others.

Poland, calling himself "Jefferson Fuck Poland", having his name legally changed thereto and identifying as bisexual, participated in one of the first known LGBT rights demonstrations in the United States. Poland, along with organizer Randy Wicker and several others, picketed the Whitehall Induction Center in New York City to protest the US military's exclusion of homosexuals from military service and the violation of confidentiality of gay men's draft records. Sources differ on the date of this demonstration, with some citing 1963 and others 1964.

Poland first made national news in August 1965 with the "Nude Wade-in" he led with Ina Saslow and Shirley Einseidel at Aquatic Park, a public beach in San Francisco. This event was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle and Time.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Psychedelic Venus Church

In 1970, Jefferson F. Poland founded the Psychedelic Venus Church, an offshoot of the Sexual Freedom League, with Mother Boats becoming President. He felt that the leadership of the Sexual Freedom League was becoming too "bourgeois". The (entheogenic) sacrament of the Psychedelic Venus Church was marijuana and, after lighting up, at each meeting a woman was chosen to be Venus. At the beginning of services, she was placed on an altar, candles were lit on each side of her, and her vulva was smeared with honey. Each of the males (and some women if so inclined) at the meeting licked the woman's vulva in order to honor the goddess Venus. Then the orgy began in earnest. Meetings continued in the San Francisco Bay Area until 1972.

Jefferson Poland Archive

Jefferson Poland turned over his archives to the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, where they are now available for public viewing by academic researchers.

Sex offense, flight, and name change

In 1983, Poland was charged with child molestation. Apparently, in 1980 a nudist couple had entrusted Poland with the care of their daughter while they were attending a swinger party while nude sunbathing on Black's Beach in La Jolla, a neighborhood of San Diego. Years later, the couple's daughter accused Poland of having performed cunnilingus on her while her parents were away.

Poland fled the country and he lived for five years as a fugitive in Australia. In 1988, he was extradited back to the U.S. By that time he had changed his name legally to “Clitlick.” He pleaded guilty to “lewd or lascivious act with a child,” a felony. He served about nine months in San Diego County Jail. Upon his release, he returned to live in San Francisco, where he is monitored as a registered sex offender.

Books

• Sex Marchers (1968) ISBN 0-923891-13-7
• The Records of the San Francisco Sexual Freedom League by Jefferson F. Poland and Valerie Alison with preface by Herbert Gold, Olympia Press, 1971

References

• Fletcher, Lynne Yamaguchi (1992). The First Gay Pope and Other Records. Boston, Alyson Publications. ISBN 1-55583-206-7.