Steven Dworkin was another one of Dunbar’s recruits for the commune. In late 1968, Steven attended Dunbar’s weekly gatherings for the Environmental School that were held at the All Saints Church on Waller Street. As an aside, this church was one of the locations out of which the Diggers had operated. It was where Walt Reynolds taught the Diggers how to bake whole wheat bread in discarded coffee cans. In late 1968, at one of Dunbar’s meetings, the Sutter Street commune showed up to check out the Environmental School Free University. This is when Dunbar and Steven met the commune. Dunbar soon decided to accept the commune’s invitation to move in, and Steven followed within a short time. With a little prompting, Steven soon had a brainstorm idea for a new project — to publish an intercommunal newspaper to stay in contact with other communes in the Bay Area. He named the newspaper Kaliflower as a pun on the term Kali Yuga which, in Hindu cosmology, is the end times of destruction.

The first issue of Kaliflower was April 24, 1969. It was distributed to a handful of communes. A copy of the first issue can be seen hanging from clothespins on the Kaliflower plywood board, another of Steven’s inventions. Each commune would have a Kaliflower board hanging in the kitchen where the weekly issue would be attached. The cover of this first issue would set the tone for the homoerotic imagery that became one of the hallmarks of Kaliflower. Even though the commune was a mix of sexual orientations, it had the reputation of being a gay commune. With creatures like Hibiscus and Jilala and Ralif dressing up and performing as the Kitchen Sluts while preparing the communal meal every night, it’s hard not to see how that reputation was gained. Over the period of three years of continuous weekly publication, Kaliflower grew from a handful to more than 300 communes that received the Free newspaper which was hand delivered every Thursday.