Over the summer, my hometown Congressman Kevin Kiley — a rare California Republican — called UC Berkeley a “cartoonishly leftist institution” in a high-stakes congressional interrogation of campus chancellor Rich Lyons.

The image he painted with this phrase might say more about my small, right-of-center hometown where Kiley and I grew up than the city of Berkeley itself. While I’d like to contextualize my time in Berkeley in its storied past as a birthplace of revolutionary rebellion, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily accurate to my current reality. I know there’s a reason people believe Berkeley is a much wilder place than it is today; a confluence of decades-long depictions of the city have helped solidify its image in the collective imagination. When did “Bezerkeley” die? Or did it even exist in the first place?

The Berkeley Barb, an iconic Berkeley newspaper, is one such storyteller. This past month, I spent a few days steeped in Berkeley nostalgia with the people who ran it as they gathered to celebrate the paper’s 60th anniversary.

It was through their reunion and conversations with former Barb members that I began to understand how Berkeley came to be constructed and captured, in part by the Barb, as a “cartoonishly leftist” place.

The aging former members of the Barb describe it as a “pioneering paper” and a “political event.” Endeavouring to encapsulate its 15 years of production, members point to the wild sex stories and ads that left the pages flush with ploys for hookups and escorts in a time before Tinder and Grindr. They called it the “Internet” of the day.

Flip through an issue of the Barb and you’ll find a letter from a man in prison working to preserve Humboldt forest, an article titled, “Panther’s On Move to ‘United Front’” and dozens of ads for models, such as one that reads, “BIG JOHN … Most popular and most hung.”

The Barb was founded in 1965 by Max Scherr who, contrary to the idea that the paper represented the youth culture of the time, was 49 years old. Sheer either didn’t pay writers, or paid them very little (depending on who you ask), but many “got by” selling the paper for 15 or 20 cents. That, at least, could not happen today.

Attending a Barb anniversary panel and party, I spoke with a man who traveled to Portugal with his Daily Cal press pass to cover the overthrow of their fascist government, stories of fighting the draft in Oakland and then countless accounts of the sex stories that manifested in the ads and columns of each week’s issue.

Perhaps the Barb’s most influential moment came with the relatively innocuous promotion of a community space between Dwight Way and Haste Street in April 1969. It took up about an eighth of a page in the paper and decried the UC Regents for tearing down homes to build a parking lot.

As I combed through the extensive collection of Barbs saved by Assistant Editor John Jekabson, I was surprised to learn that the activists and students who came to make this space, later dubbed “People’s Park,” thought it would last two weeks upon its inception, a month at most.

As the role of cartoonist had been filled, Jekabson assumed a photographer role at the Barb, capturing the early days of People’s Park. He shot moments in time that have now been mythologized in the history of our “leftist institution,” such as the National Guard blocking Sather Gate, tear gassings of students by local police and the shooting of park activist James Rector, which took up an entire issue of the Barb.

Jekabson explained that the occupation of Berkeley by the National Guard was an “overreaction” from then-governor Ronald Reagan. It was this that carried the movement, he said. It was a framing of People’s Park I hadn’t heard — one that wasn’t so tinted with nostalgia for a better time.

Berkeley, it turned out, was no more revolutionary than it was reactionary. A product of its time, the movement spawned in opposition to a moment of repressive governance. While this feeling was not unique to Berkeley, perhaps something within the cultural fabric of the city allowed revolution to proliferate. And perhaps, in the decades following the Free Speech Movement, radicalism became enshrined as a faux cultural identity while protest became expected but largely ineffective. And now, in another moment of authoritarianism, I wonder, what would it take to bring back Bezerkeley?

Perhaps the National Guard.

Jekabson’s view of Berkeley, while fairly consistent with the narrative currently thrown across the walls of coffee shops and boutique retailers in the city, provided nuance. His eyes helped me parse through the fictionalized leftist haven Berkeley occupies today. According to Jekabson, “Berkeley still lives in this image,” but its “quirky” characterization is “all relative.”

Even if the Barb presented a somewhat illusory view of radical Berkeley in the ’60s, the paper’s value was not tied to capturing Berkeley exactly as it was, but imagining the Berkeley some leftists wanted to see.

It’s idealistic to remember Berkeley as this complete haven for new ideas and the sexual revolution, and it was idealistic at the time to portray it that way. But insofar as idealizing Berkeley, it allowed the Barb to publish, for 15 years, a paper that constructed an imagination that could be harangued in a Congressional chamber.

The Barb allowed people to read, where Barb alums felt other newspapers faltered, about Huey Newton and Bobby Seale before they formed the Black Panther Party. Or of local protests, such as one at the Forum Restaurant to allow men with long hair to dine, after one such man (an early hippie) was kicked out. Or the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, for the release of whom the Symbionese Liberation Army demanded through an ad in Barb’s pages that the Hearst family distribute millions of dollars worth of food to those in need.

It was these niche accounts that allowed the Barb to grow its customer base, which at its peak was 90,000 a week. The Barb wasn’t just creating and cataloging Berkeley for Berkeley, but also across the U.S. and the world.

Those readers probably didn’t realize that 1960s Berkeley was a city with a Republican city government that voted unanimously to reaffirm the U.S. Vietnam War policy or consider the conservative underpinnings of a nuclear Bay Area buoyed by defense contractors.

And, like Kiley now, they may ignore alternative narratives of Berkeley: the bleed of Silicon Valley and biotech into a city where the cost of living has skyrocketed; where unhoused people are displaced in militarized sweeps without any promise of a greener pasture; where freshmen walk by a wall of gray shipping containers between Dwight Way and Haste Street and don’t think twice.

This, of course, can’t be the whole picture. One can look instead at residents’ strong support for tenants and unions, emphasis on public transit and bike lanes and ongoing vocal declaration against the genocide in Gaza, starting with students’ encampments on Sproul Plaza.

There is no one way to depict Berkeley, what it stands for or what it really is. Maybe it should be expected that conservatives play into the notion that Berkeley is a place where people dance naked in the street, hold daily protests and go to sauna-sex clubs to wash off the stench of sewers.

While I disagree with Kiley’s caricature, it is grounded in a myth that endures. Berkeley has always been a contested story without a fixed identity; one that each generation claims, exaggerates or distorts to build a new understanding.

Perhaps that is the Barb’s real legacy: not just recording Berkeley, but ensuring it could never be pinned down.