I
was born in a rural village on the banks of the................uh, I guess we
don't have to start that far back.When My World Was Young...
1945 - 1956
I
was born in a rural village on the banks of the................uh, I guess we
don't have to start that far back.
However, it does matter that I was an extremely
precocious reader as a child. It was this ability which gave me some
glimpses into
another - secret - world. And these glimpses, though I was often confused
or even thunderstruck by them, were far clearer than those being afforded by my emerging
sense of the erotic, which was in itself something altogether puzzling and a bit
scary
My
fantasy of "the man on the rock".
Late in the Forties, when I would have been around ten
years old, I started reading a book I picked out of my aunt's
bookcase. It had looked to be an adventure story about a man's journey from
the Middle East to China. What that adventure might be about never became clear
to me, and I continued reading only because of the descriptions of exotic
places. The rest of it seemed to be sort of about that "love" stuff that
grownups were wound up in - and so damned tightlipped about. Then something
else came up. It seemed an awful lot like the love stuff too, but it was about
another man, and having close to zero idea what that love stuff between men and
women was all about, this really was a case of absolute zero. Nothing
much seemed to
happen in any event, though I was awfully intrigued by the description of the
other guy lying naked on a rock, sunning himself - so intrigued that I kept
going back to reread the passage. In the end things didn’t get any clearer...but I
did like the book...and the picture in my mind of that man on the rock. The
book was The Asiatics by Frederic Prokosch. Prokosch, as I was to learn
much, much later from a friend of his was gay. He managed to work a veiled
homosexuality into many of his books, adroitly camouflaged by his rather ornate
writing style and a general penchant for exotica and ambiguity.
About this time I began to have the usual homosexual fumblings with grade school friends. My peepee was becoming a prick. I also made sneaking forays into that section of the library where the forbidden adult arcana was stashed. The finds were stunning. Now I had a penis! Unfortunately the jargon in these books was so esoteric that the mechanics of the fuck really eluded me. However, I did get the picture that "love" stuff was a lot of wrapping paper around "sex" stuff. And I did get that some men did this stuff with other men. They were "homosexuals" or "inverts," and this was not good sex stuff. Not a happy discovery as I was quite liking it by this time.
During the summer between sixth grade and the
beginning of junior high school, an older classmate gave me what could quite
appropriately be described as a cram course in sex, as it moved from “playing
doctor” to penetration.
My discovery that there was an actual subculture of
homosexuals - although I wouldn't have known what that meant at the time -
occurred not much later. I was visiting some relatives and was bored listening
to them talk, so I began to leaf through my uncle's magazines. One of them was
Esquire. There wasn't much of anything in it for me, in most cases
the articles were about topics I hardly grasped. Something caught my eye,
and I began to read an article. It may have been about New York City in general or
perhaps about its "low
life", I can't remember. But at one point the article it began
describing a group of bars called the Bird Circuit. Their nickname came from
the fact that they all had a bird motif in their names, i.e. - Blue Parrot,
etc. These were places where homosexual men met and socialized. Oh my gawd, and
right there in a magazine too! I closed it immediately, afraid that someone
might ask me what I was reading.
WW II, food rationing
This was my first indication that homosexuality had a dimension larger than that of an erect penis. Although I learned nothing more about homosexual social life for years, I never forgot that first glimpse in Esquire magazine.
My parents had married in the early 30's after knowing
each other just six weeks - he was 18, she was 19. Both came from families of
Irish origin. However, my mother, whose family were dedicated (and staunchly
anti-Catholic) Presbyterians, converted to my father's Catholic faith - despite
the fact that my father did not attend church! A daughter born a few years
after their marriage was severely deformed and died shortly after her first
birthday. My father did heavy manual labor for a living, and they/we were to
live in a state of ongoing financial insecurity until the post-WW II years.
During the war my father was exempt from active duty because his job was
deemed vital to the war effort.
'44,
bobby soxers in a record store
As long as I could remember he worked literally from
dawn to dusk (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) and sometimes longer, seven days a week, three
hundred and sixty-five days a year. His only days off are when he is
hospitalized. My mother went on secret spending binges for clothes, causing
bills to accumulate. The rent is often late, sometimes we run out of credit at
the grocery store. I go to a public school, but I enjoy the Christian Doctrine
classes we Catholics attend (during "released time" from public school) once a week at the
tiny parochial school.
1942 war propaganda poster
August 1945: I've just turned
seven. Everyone rushes down to Main Street for a spontaneous celebration on V-J
Day (the surrender of Japan.) People are packed on the sidewalks and hanging
out of windows, laughing and crying; the school band has gotten its instruments
and is leading a rag-tag parade, some people are on foot while others are
standing and sitting on the tops of slow-moving cars, throwing shredded waste
paper and streamers of toilet paper in lieu of confetti and crepe paper. It is
exciting, but the unbridled craziness - like nothing I've ever seen from
grownups - is a little frightening. I understand that the Honor Roll in front
of the Village Hall will not get any more names, and the curfews and blackouts
won't happen again, but I grew up with the other neighborhood kids playing
"war," seeing movies about "the war", collecting scrap metal for "the war,"
picking milkweed pods to be used in "the war," using ration books for food
because of "the war"......"the war" has always been there in my life. What
comes after "the war?"
1946 
* The first meeting of the United Nations organization takes place in an effort to build a forum for the peaceful solution of world problems out of the WW II anti-Axis alliance. Already, however, the Soviet Union is backing away from its wartime partners, and in the speech in which Churchill declares that an "Iron Curtain" had fallen across Europe, he also tells his American audience:
"In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center."
The Cold War is now
official.
Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, Pres. Truman in background.
* Charles Jackson, author of best selling
The
Lost Weekend, a breakthrough novel about alcoholism, writes The Fall of
Valor - a book about a middle-aged man's discovery of his homosexuality.
Booze, yes, the critics say; homos, no. And so much for his career.
The Lost Weekend had been made into an award-winning film in 1945, but
the studio changed
the source of the protagonist's problem drinking from
the accusation that he had an affair with a male friend in college (as in the
book) to frustration over of a case of writer's block.
Jackson would commit suicide in New York's Chelsea Hotel in 1968.
* Ford Motors creates the first automated industrial production line. Fender sells the first electric guitars, an innovation that was to become a hallmark sound in the not-too far off popular music revolution.
1947
*
The Soviet Union begins a blockade of the Western Allies' part of Berlin that lasts for two years, forcing the Berlin airlift by the Allies to supply their sectors of the city with all the food, fuel and supplies needed to sustain the life of its citizens and the Western occupation forces.
* The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), created during the Red Scare of the Thirties, is revived. Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney, among other Hollywood figures, testify as "friendly witnesses," and Ayn Rand also testifies to pro-communism in the film industry. Reagan, continued to be a pipeline for confirming or denying the Communist associations of Hollywood figures. Those who refuse to testify are blacklisted and their careers are destroyed, some receive prison sentences.
* Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department member, is indicted for perjury in regard to his activities on behalf of the Soviet Union.
* Billie Graham holds tent crusade in Los
Angeles; Hearst orders his papers to provide favorable coverage.
Elizabeth Short: The Black Dahlia.
* The lurid Black Dahlia murder case, in which a young would-be movie actress turned party girl is savagely tortured and eviscerated, fascinates readers across the nation. Americans have a voracious appetite for stories about sex and violence, providing an appropriate "moral" is tacked onto them as an excuse for the titillation they provide. (The case remains unsolved.)
February '48 issue
* Jackie Robinson becomes the first black professional baseball player. He faces the abuse of fellow players and fans alike with great dignity, and the white face of the national leagues begins to change.
* Ingrid Bergman, who has risen to the heights of movie stardom with Casablanca and Notorious, is awarded a Tony for her performance in Joan of Lorraine in the first annual presentation of the awards. However, a little over a year later, while working on a film in Italy, she has an extra-marital affair which results in the birth of an illegitimate son. She is denounced on the floor of U.S. Senate as "Hollywood's apostle of degradation" and the senator declares that she will never be allowed to set foot on American soil again. Her film career in the U.S. goes on ice. Ingrid Bergman: "Apostle of Degradation"
1948
Buffalo Bob, Howdy Doody and the Peanut Gallery
* Dr. Alfred Kinsey's
book, Sexuality in the Human Male, shocks Americans. Its report of
a high incidence of homosexual behavior and orientation is especially repugnant.
Its research and comments on homosexuality continue to be some of the most
misquoted and misused material on the subject by both gay people and their adversaries
for the next half century.
* Heralded new young writer, Gore Vidal, publishes The City and the Pillar, a completely undisguised novel about a homosexual protagonist and taking place in the homosexual subculture. The New York Times refuses to review his next five books and his fiction career takes a hit. However, he would resurface and was to become America's most well-known and brilliant gay public figure during the second half of the 20th century -- novelist, playwright, politician, essayist and social commentator.
Gore Vidal put a knot in America's shorts with his second novel, and
1949
* Communist revolutionary forces win in China, defeating the government of America's WW II ally Chiang Kai-shek The Chiang government flees to Taiwan. In Europe the Berlin Blockage has failed, but the Soviet Union has managed the Communist takeover of all the governments in the countries its forces occupy in Eastern Europe. All opposition - political and religious - is eradicated and these countries have become police states. Communist parties are strong in France and Italy.
* The Union of South Africa begins the official implementation of the Apartheid system, which classifies all citizens by race and keeps them rigidly separated. Disapproving articles appear in American magazines. This despite the fact that in the U.S. - contrary to later impressions - laws mandating some form of racial segregation are in force in twenty-one states, only eleven of these are in the Deep South. The definition of a "Negro" in the state of Mississippi is anyone with "one drop" of Negro blood.
* Billboard magazine, the weekly bible of the music industry, ceases using the term "race music" to describe record sales charts of music by black artists intended for the "Negro" market. It substitutes the term Rhythm & Blues coined by white reporter Jerry Wexler, who thought "race music" was offensive. In the Fifties Wexler would join Atlantic Records and in the 60's, as a musical producer, he recorded Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and other black artists. He was a major figure in bringing black "soul music" into the American pop music mainstream.
* Kukla, Fran & Ollie, supposedly a children's puppet show, moves to an adult time slot to accommodate its huge adult audience. The dialogue is improvised, sophisticated, filled with double entendres and flagrantly campy. Thank you Burr Tillstrom! Eleven years old, and the subversion of camp was
getting
through. My mother says, "I don't know how kids understand this."
Did she?
* Frozen foods and packaged "mixes" are appearing as standard items in food stores.
* The weird looking 45 rpm record makes its debut. Made of something called vinyl and thin and shiny with a big fat hole that couldn't be accommodated by existing record players, what was this supposed to be? But it was virtually unbreakable, much more convenient to store and cheaper to make, and the brains behind this little beast knew exactly where they were tossing it - kids. It was a time bomb: and it had a very short fuse.
*
George Orwell's 1984 is published. (OK, so he was 16 years off.)
* Lost Boundaries, a movie depicting a "Negro" family that passes for white opens. It is a critical success, but it makes white audiences uncomfortable, and theatres in the South refuse to show it. The story is drawn from the life of a real New Hampshire family. As with the novel Quatrefoil, po-mo critics have lambasted the film as timid, conveniently forgetting that in this era the making of it risked the careers of many people and that the film crew was responsible for breaking racist public accommodations barriers in the state of New Hampshire.
* Late in the Forties my parents buy a dilapidated house with no heating, and we leave the neighborhood where I have grown up. Despite the fact the war is over, my father keeps his same Spartan work schedule; even as he becomes successful and can hire people to work for him he spends his increasing free time down on Main Street. By this time I am painfully aware that my parents are not happily married, and no part of our three-way relationship is free of suffocating tension and frustration.
By the end of the decade America's three great post-war struggles are already well-defined: The Cold War abroad and the Red Scare at home, the battle over legislated segregation and racism, and the struggle to maintain the conservative sexual and social standards of the previous decades despite the profound dislocations of the war years.
Johnny Weissmuller
Your Hit Parade radio show appeals as much to parents as their adolescent children. The Bobby Soxer image of the adolescent is
alive and well - and not a negative one. If Hit Parade type music seems caught in a time warp, jazz is not. While mainstream Big Band music is rapidly dying out, small jazz combos and various solo artists are vibrant and innovative (if not mainstream) - Charley Parker and Bebop (music) are the cutting edge. West 52nd Street in Manhattan is still lined with jazz joints, and other cities across the nation have their jazz strips too. It's not Benny Goodman, however. And the world of jazz clubs is regarded with suspicion by many middle class whites who associate it with "dope," loose morals, etc. - and not least of all the "Negro" and casual attitudes toward "race mixing."
West 52nd Street, late 40's (Frank Driggs Collection)
The world of the black American is kept at a distance by most whites no matter how close it might be as a physical fact - blacks are seen as comical, stupid and clumsily well-intentioned, yet powerfully sexual and violent. And in the end, always a problem to be dealt with.
Robert Duncan
By the end of the war thousands of gay men and lesbians have received Blue Discharges, and many are dumped unceremoniously in U.S. port cities after being brought back from abroad. It has been frequently suggested that this had the effect of concentrating gay populations in New York and San Francisco. In 1944 gay poet Robert Duncan had published The Homosexual in Society. (He had received a dishonorable discharge from the army for being gay.) While neither he nor it became household words, even for gay people, it should be remembered that Duncan and other gay poets were leading figures among what are known as the San Francisco and the New York poets, as well in the Beat Generation. Their overtly gay poetry is a major part of the small amount of what would now be termed
Bob Mizer"out" artistic works in those dangerous times. In 1945 Bob Mizer and two others started the Athletic Model Guild, the vanguard for the male homoerotic magazines which were to become characteristic of the 1950's gay male world. The homosexual is so odious (and usually hidden ) that he - but, God forbid! certainly not she - rarely has an openly acknowledged place in the American mind. Guy Gabrielson, Republican National Committee Chairman, would declare in the following year, "Perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years...The country would be more aroused over this tragic angle of the situation if it were not for the difficulties of the newspapers and radio commentators in adequately presenting the facts, while respecting the decency of the American people." Alas.
In terms of the gay history of New York City the landmark gay event of the decade is probably the closing of a bar called Gloria's back in 1940. The bar fought the closure claiming that the law contained no provisions against "sexual variants being served at a bar." The court did not agree, and the right of the State to continue closing bars for serving gay men and women was cast in court-approved concrete. From this time on the public social life of gay New York was incontestably at the mercy of the State Liquor Authority, which enforced a policy that made it illegal to congregate and serve homosexuals in licensed premises. It was not until the Gay Liberation of New York began with the successful "Sip In" of 1966 that this strangle hold was finally broken.
THE FIFTIES: GREY FIFTIES - NOT! THEY WERE RED HOT!
1950
Sen. McCarthy and his list.
* Korean War begins.
In response to the invasion of South Korea by North Korea President Truman
orders U.S. troops there to repel the invasion. The US and UN forces succeed
against the North Koreans at first, but the entry of Communist China into the
war causes heavy casualties and the fortunes of war reverse. 
* Lucky Strikes' popular radio show Your Hit Parade debuts on TV. It stars clean-cut looking, mature, white performers only, and it features the type of music (and performing styles) that white teenagers will very soon abandon wholesale -- light melodies, sweet lyrics and wholesome singers, innocent and inoffensive "feel-good" tunes that reflect the mood of white middle class, suburban and small town America. Mona Lisa and The Tennessee Waltz are big hits this year, they are typical of white pop music. And they are Snoozeville, Daddy-o. Neither the producers nor the performers were able to cope with the spirit and energy of rock 'n' roll; it became painful to watch and the show was put to sleep at the end of the 1959 season.
Hit Paraders:
Russell Arms, Giselle McKenzie,
Dorothy Collins, Snooky Lanson.
* The Mattachine Society (usually credited as the first gay civil rights organization) is founded in California. Harry Hay, its prime mover, is a former Communist.
* The McCarran Internal Security Act is vetoed by President Truman, but is passed again - overriding the president's veto. The act contains draconian security measures aimed at the Communist threat, including a provision for the creation of detention camps "for emergency situations."
* Quatrefoil is published. James Barr's long novel is another landmark of gay fiction. In the closing decades of the 20th century it would be repeatedly lambasted by gay critics as being "accomodationist," and its author branded something like an Auntie Tom - all without regard to the era in which the novel appeared. This is ironic considering the radical turn of post-AIDS gay politics in the direction of hetwannabeism and assimilation.
magazines causes me to develop such furtive browsing
techniques that I am lucky not to have been arrested on suspicion of
shoplifting, and to actually get these items to the cash register and have the
sale rung up unseen by anyone is an agony that surely affirmed the Catholic
notion of temporal punishment due to sin.
'58 issue of a Weider
publication A popular beefcake magazine
1951
* HUAC begins a second wave of
hearings in the lower chamber of Congress, and Sen. Joseph McCarthy leads
the charge in the Senate. The
already overheated political climate degenerates into a three-year era of
grossly exaggerated charges and unfounded and unsubstantiated denunciations that
spread paranoia and hysteria throughout the nation. The word "McCarthyism" finds
its place in the American language as a result. Roy Cohn, a closeted gay
lawyer, is McCarthy's right-hand man and young Bobby Kennedy does his brief bit
for the Senator too.
* Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of
spying for the Soviet Union and sentenced to death. The judge declares they are
responsible for 40,000 dead Americans in the Korean War. The evidence against
Mrs. Rosenberg is flimsy at best.
* Production costs and ticket prices have yet to soar through the roof, and the Fifties sees a string of colorful Broadway musicals with great songs. The King and I, starring Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, opens on March 13. Set in the royal court in Bangkok in the 1860's, it has dazzling sets and costumes, and runs for 1,246 performances. The songs Hello, Young Lovers, Getting to Know You, Something Wonderful, and I Have Dreamed are covered by pop artists and find a place on the Hit Parade. The exotic looking, shaved-headed Brynner becomes a major star.
1942 nude of Brynner by gay photographer, George Platt Lynes.
Julie Harris as Sally
Bowles
Alain Delon as Ripley
One of Alfred Hitchcock's most esteemed films, the film noir classic Strangers on a Train, comes out in 1951, starring Robert Walker and bisexual actor Farley Granger. Based on the first novel of author, Patricia Highsmith (also bisexual), it brings her fame, especially in Europe. Her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, will be made into a movie in France, and released in the U.S. in 1960 as Purple Noon. Highsmith said that its intense and handsome star, Alain Delon, was ideal as the sociopathic Ripley, and he went on to become a talented international star. A 1999 remake starred Matt Damon, playing Ripley as a more confused and even likeable character.
In
his West 20th St. apartment in Manhattan the unknown Jack Kerouac bangs out the
manuscript of a novel on one long roll of paper in three weeks. On the
Road is the thinly disguised adventures of his idol Neal Cassady (as the fictional
Dean Moriarty) and himself, and when the book was finally published in 1957 it
would signal the emergence of the Beat movement on the American scene.
The general public assumed Kerouac himself to be the model for Dean Moriarty,
but it was a role he was not suited for and a pose he could not sustain.
The real-life Cassady outlasted the heyday of the Beats, and lived just long
enough to streak across the Hippy firmament as one of Ken Kesey's Merry
Pranksters, where he may be found in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool Aid Acid
Test. Kerouac, however, suffered an inglorious fate: he slid into
moroseness and heavy drinking, becoming a recluse -- and finally the willing
prisoner of his rigidly conventional mother. He would die a thoroughly de-balled and
domesticated creature, querulous and deeply conservative -- a monument to
the power of straight. 1952
* War hero, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower is elected President of the United States and serves for two terms. He is a modest man, and one who finds the business of campaigning and politicking distasteful. "I like Ike" is his campaign slogan - and it is hard not to like Ike. Earnest, oftentimes worried-looking, clearly much happier on the golf course than at a press conference - his genial, unassuming fatherly image becomes a tranquilizer for Americans exhausted by the war and terrified of the Red Menace.
* "Jungle music" shows up. Hot damn! Across the country white teenagers within the broadcasting range of radio stations playing what had been called "race music" until only a few years before, have embraced Rhythm and Blues as their own. The proprietor of the Dolphin Record Store, one of the biggest black-owned record stores in Los Angeles, reports that in one year his customers have gone from zero whites to 40 percent white. Cleveland DJ Alan Freed uses the term "Rock and Roll" for the new (to whites) music, and his audience has gone from being all black to heavily white. (Though Freed later claimed to have coined the term, "rock and roll" was a black slang term for the sex act, dating back to the early 1920's. A fact that most whites were blissfully unaware of.) "Race music" is entering most white American homes for the first time.
Little
Richard: "Rhythm and blues had a baby and somebody named it rock and roll."
* Popular yellow journalism writers, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer inform Americans in their latest book, U.S.A. Confidential, that juvenile delinquency is linked "with tom-toms and hot jive and ritualistic orgies of erotic dancing, weed-smoking and mass mania, with African jungle background. Many music shops purvey dope; assignations are made in them. White girls are recruited for colored lovers....We know that many platter-spinners [DJ's] are hopheads. Many others are Reds, left-wingers or hecklers of social convention....[teenagers] frequent places the radio oracles plug, which is done with design...to hook juves [teenagers] and guarantee a new generation subservient to the Mafia.” Another wild-eyed obsession of this pair is homosexuality, and when after a few years Mortimer would focus his attention on this it would have a direct impact on my life.
*
The American Psychiatric Association adds
homosexuality to its list of mental illnesses.
* Former U.S. soldier George Jorgensen, now Christine, achieves notoriety for her sex change done in Denmark. For many years her name will be used by comedians as an acceptable public allusion to anything referring to homosexuality. Instant laughs. Hyuk hyuk. Jorgenson took most of the humor in stride and was quite tolerant of intrusive questioning...up to a point. However, years later when she was a guest of the The Dick Cavett Show. Cavett offended her by asking about the status of her private life with her "wife." She walked off the show and as she was the only guest scheduled, Cavett had to fumble through the rest of the show talking about how he had not meant to offend her.
A Visit to Mary's
Early in the winter of '52 Donald Richie, who would later become famous as the leading Western authority on Japanese film and a Japanophile, was studying at Columbia Univeristy in NYC. He had spent his Army service in Japan and was asked to show a young visiting Japanese author, Yukio Mishima, around the town. His visitor's Confessions of a Mask was just being translated for an American edition. Included on
Detail of young Richie from cover of Japan Journals Richie, who was homosexual (he does not use the word "gay" as a personal preference), knew there were some in the Village, and with Mishima in tow they located Mary's on Eighth Street. Richie describes their visit: "There we sat over our drinks and watched middle-aged men talk like women. This was something neither of us had expected and it was not very interesting. "Nonetheless he gravely thanked me...."Mishima's list of things to do was a visit to a real gay bar, which he explained to Richie was because his half finished novel, Forbidden Colors, had several scenes in such places.
(Summarized from The Japan Journals 1947 - 2004, Donald Richie)
1953
* President Eisenhower enthusiastically implements a policy which brands all homosexuals unfit for service in the Federal government and includes provisions for their arrest.
* The Korean War ends. The U.S. accepts a truce
as the solution to the war - the first major war in its history that the U.S.
has not won. It becomes the "forgotten war."
* The Rosenbergs are electrocuted at Sing Sing prison. Protests against the executions had been held in many places in the U.S. and around the world, and leading figures pleaded for mercy, including the Pope. The first 57-second jolt fails to kill Ethel, she is strapped back into the chair to receive two more jolts. After the Cold War ends it is discovered from Russian agents that she was not in their employ. Whoooooops.
Mrs. Rosenberg (center) is escorted to the Death House.
* Jerome Robbins, a leading choreographer – and a gay man, cooperates with HUAC in naming associates with supposed Communist sympathies or connections.
* Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, an indictment of witch hunting, opens at the Martin Beck Theater in New York City. It takes aim squarely at McCarthyism.
A 1954 issue of One 1955 issue of Mattachine Review* One, a (non-beefcake) homophile magazine, begins publication.
* Los Angeles Mattachine Society dumps its members with past Communist links.
1954
* Brown v. Board of Education. In this watershed case the Supreme Court rules that school segregation is unconstitutional. While the decision does not contain a timetable for the desegregation of schools, nor does it ban other forms of segregation, there is no doubt in any quarter that finally the obligation for "Negro" equality had been laid squarely on the Federal government.
* Senator Lester Hunt commits suicide. He had been told that Senator McCarthy intended to reveal that his son had been arrested in Washington, DC on charges connected with homosexuality.
* The 45 rpm record player, which began as a small special unit which you attached to your radio in order to play the new size records has become the monster it was intended to be. It is now the industry standard - the old brittle 78 rpms are becoming history - and the player's small size, low price and portable models mean that teenagers can take their music with them. In the era when the musical tastes of adults and teenagers are radically diverging, this little machine might lay claim to being the rocket which propelled the development of a youth market in music - with soft drinks, clothing and other products rapidly jumping on for the profitable ride. The Fifties were definitely the time when adolescents became firmly identified as a separate entity apart from adults - popularly portrayed and worried about as being in fierce opposition to family life and parental control.
* Sen. McCarthy begins hearings to prove that the
U.S. army has been infiltrated by Communists. With the help of President
Eisenhower and unedited footage of the hearings taken by newsman Ed Murrow the
army is exonerated and "McCarthyism" in all its squalid dishonesty is laid bare
to the public. McCarthy is censured by the Senate - only the third
time in its history that it has taken such a measure. Red-baiting dies
down, and the Senator dies in 1957 of the effects of years of alcoholism.
* This year I saw my first Broadway show when the national company of Kismet played in a nearby city. I went with my high school best friend, whom I had had sex with a few times and who shared my passion for muscle mags. The musical was bound to bowl me over - a bubbling, humorous tale set in long-ago Baghdad, sumptuous sets from an Arabian Nights fantasy and a talented cast singing songs
derived from the
most romantic works of Alexander Borodin.
Marvin Eder Steve Reeves
However, it was the unexpected sight of Steve Reeves and Marvin Eder - two bodybuilding "stars" of the era - stripped to the waist, playing guards of the Wazir, that almost induced cardiac arrest in my adolescent heart. Gulp! It was really, really true - they do look like that in the flesh! Oh my gawd...
"THE HOUND'S AROUND"
George "Hound Dog" Lorenz
In 1954 George "Hound Dog" Lorenz, a DJ who'd been playing R&B on a small daylight station, WHLD (or was it WJJL?), in Niagara Falls, NY moves to 50,000 watt WKBW in Buffalo, and premiers live with Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown from the racially mixed Zanzibar Lounge in the black ghetto. Lorenz was one of the first white DJ's to play what had been called "race music" full time on his shows. At night the station can sometimes be heard as far as Tennessee. I had been a religiously dedicated listener since his Niagara Falls days. Alan Freed moves to WINS in New York City. R&B and rock and roll are twisting the tail of the pop music industry. It is difficult today to imagine the intensity with which teenagers responded to these rock 'n' roll DJ's. Soon parents, schools, clergymen, politicians and the legion of self-appointed social commentators would be blaming them for every problem associated with young people.
Deborah Kerr & John Kerr in Tea and Sympathy, 1953
* I'm sixteen. I try heterosexual sex and have a steady girlfriend for the next four years. Except for lapses in my fantasies I don't have sex with guys. Look, everything else is changing. (Of the forty-five guys in my class I have had sex with four on a repeated basis. As adults one will marry but be an eager piece of trade, two will be gay and the other I lost track of completely. A fifth, whom I did not have sex with, will end up in jail after committing petty theft and running away with his boyfriend. Both were teenagers.)
* Swanson markets the first "TV Dinner." Americans buy 10,000,000 the first year!
1955
* Bisexual actor James Dean, a talented actor with stage and live TV drama credits, is brought to Hollywood after starring in a stage adaptation of Gide's novel, The Immoralist, a story with a homosexual theme. He explodes into stardom with Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. The former creates the image that millions of American teenagers identify with. His famous red jacket becomes a teenage trade mark.
James Dean in the famous red jacket.
* Blackboard Jungle, a film about juvenile delinquency, based on Evan Hunter's shockingly vivid novel, features the song Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets. The song becomes a teenage anthem. The Bobbie Soxers have faded away and in their place is the secretive, clannish and sometimes sullen and disrespectful teenager. That word acquires such bad associations that there are even attempts by school authorities and others to force the use of various imbecilic labels in its place - dudes and dudettes, is one pair I recall.
* July 3rd Buffalo's WWOL DJ Guy King climbs out a studio window with a mike to broadcast his show from the top of a billboard overlooking Shelton Square. He exhorts his audience of teenagers in the square below to honk their horns if they want to hear a repeat of the song he is playing. The song was Bill Haley and the Comets' Rock Around the Clock. Teenagers pile into their cars and descend into the area - the honking doesn't stop, Rock Around the Clock doesn't stop and the result is holiday eve traffic chaos. After two hours King was dragged off to jail for the stunt. Several thousand teenagers had brought the downtown of America's fifteenth largest city crunching to a halt. The Buffalo Evening News tucked the story on the inside pages the next day, huffing about a "caterwauling mob of children." But as radio-TV critic Gary Deeb has written, "the News blew the story, the editors failing to smell revolution when it broke wind right in their face."
* Rosa Parks, a black woman, refuses to give up her seat on a segregated bus; Emmett Till, a black teenager, is kidnapped and bludgeoned to death after making a fresh remark or whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Both events are benchmarks in the black civil rights struggle.
1956
* Black singer Nat King Cole is attacked
onstage while performing in Birmingham, Alabama by four white men. Nat Cole is
the star of a national, prime time television show in 56 - 57. It fails to
attract major advertisers, and though NBC supports it without significant
advertising revenue and top-rated stars appear at nominal union fees to bolster
it, the show folds after one season. Advertisers are convinced that they would
suffer a significant loss of sales in the South by sponsoring the show.
James Dean
* James Dean is killed in a car crash just as his third film, Giant, is wrapping up. The senselessness of his death at the height of his fame is his apotheosis. He is a god for many white teenagers. God, man. As in G-O-D.
* Elvis Presley, the white crossover singer,
releases Heartbreak Hotel. His undulating hips - not to mention
his unmentionable dangling weenie and bouncing balls - would worry the nation.
His career heralds a wave of "rockabilly" music. But his rapid taming and
conversion to pop ballad singing signaled the development of the far safer,
saccharine teen idol schlock rock. For a few years attempts to "whiten"
pop music and put a racial cordon sanitaire around the record industry
would ride this wave. Nevertheless, remember Fabian? Woof!
* Rock and Roll denounced as "a plot to mongrelize America." A White Citizens' Council spokesman in Alabama says, "We have set up a 20-man committee to do away with this vulgar, animalistic, nigger rock and roll bop." Even outside of the South its racially mixed teenage audiences upset parents and officials used to codes of customary, if not legislated, segregation R&R unabashedly celebrated the physical and sexual and ridiculed deferred gratification and the work obsession of the world of gray flannel suits. Congressmen rumble against it, parents hate it. And I was a slave to it. "Hail, hail Rock and Roll"
* Year-end music industry statistics show that 68% of the music played by radio DJ's was rock 'n' roll recordings, two-thirds more than in the previous year. At the end of the following year every song on Billboard magazine's Top Ten would be a R&R one.
*
In the era before nudity was allowed and even posing pouches were considered
suspicious gear, Bob Mizer, publisher of Physique Pictorial and owner of AMG beefcake photo business, found himself a constant focus of police attention,
and he even served jail time for his business activities. But what is less
known is that he was a feisty guy, who deeply resented the harassment which was
inflicted on all gay men, and he sometimes commented about this in the pages of PP – a risky gesture for a gay man in the police spotlight. On the
cover of the Summer, 1956 issue of Physique Pictorial he writes:
Leonard Chambers"...IN MEMORIUM...
This issue of Physique Pictorial is dedicated to LEONARD CHAMBERS
pictured here, who was SHOT AND KILLED by an off duty POLICEMAN
who was in private hire at the time! See page 3."
He continues on page 3 -- "WAS THE KILLING OF LEONARD CHAMBERS BY TWO OFF-DUTY POLICEMEN "JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE"? Acting in the employment of a private bail bondsman, two Southern California policemen forced Leonard Chambers to get in their private car for allegedly failing to appear on some traffic charges. They testified that Leonard pulled a gun on them even though they had previously searched him and had him handcuffed. In desparate [sic] "self-defense" they shot him twice in the back of the head. Leonard of course didn't live to tell his side of the story. The coroner's jurors dutifully declared this murder "justifiable homicide."
If you can't play baseball, you can't make it as a boy.
In any case, Yours Truly, a "nice kid" - an intelligent, polite, hard-working student in the world of adults - has become something else in his own world. Painfully self-conscious about being too good a student and a miserable failure at anything athletic I have competed in other ways: smoking and drinking since junior high school, regularly sneaking to bars that serve minors for three years, and probably having more sex in the past six years than many adults. In the process I have become such a smooth liar and habitual pretender that the punishments I receive are almost always for petty infractions of my curfew. When at home I retreat to my bedroom, listening to old Bessie Smith songs recently re-released on LP's or trying to make it through Joyce's Ulysses; at night I toss and turn unable to sleep, torn between my desire to be free and a deep-down fear of being too inadequate to cope anywhere else. And those magazines are still hidden on the top shelf of my closet, sitting there like a silent reproach.
By the mid-Fifties the winds of change are picking up force throughout U.S. society.
The proliferation of new products for home and personal use is making consumerism the new American Way of life, automation is changing manufacturing and threatening the blue collar worker's job, and for white collar workers there is now the "Rat Race."
Those "gosh" and "gee whiz" types called Bobbie Soxers have vanished, and parents are wondering if their prickly Teenager, who uses that irritating word "daddy-o," could possibly end up like one of those adolescent catastrophes in Rebel Without a Cause. There is now something called the Generation Gap to worry about, not to mention juvenile delinquency and Rock and Roll riots -- and somebody said they're finding used "rubbers" in the bushes around the football field! This generation of adolescents with its regular supply of spending money and the development of a separate segment of the recording industry aimed at it is the beginning of the "youth market," which will eventually become a major part of the American consumer economy.
The first five years of the decade saw live TV dramas, such as Armstrong Circle Theatre, Westinghouse Studio One and Kraft TV Theatre among others, and have featured original works by the likes of Paddy Chayevsky and Gore Vidal (quietly making a living doing TV scripts after being skunked over The City and the Pillar), and the acting talents of Rod Steiger, Geraldine Page, Paul Newman, James Dean, Steve McQueen, Susan Strassberg, etc. At the mid-Fifties taping and the move to Hollywood brought an end to this era of creativity. The sugar-coated sit-com would reign unchallenged, a reassuring world in which Communists, blacks and sex are hardly
acknowledged.
Tab HunterThe Fifties is the golden era of the Hollywood musical. There is a crop of new faces in Tinseltown, including Marilyn Monroe and closeted gay leading men, Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, George Nader, Dirk Bogarde et al. The film Man in the Gray Flannel Suit tries to explore the new world of materialism, conformity and the furious competitiveness of the white collar world. By the midpoint of the decade Marty, The Rose Tattoo, On the Waterfront, From Here to Eternity, The Country Girl, The African Queen and Streetcar Named Desire have been filmed.
The question, "What are you?" is still immediately understood by many Americans as an inquiry about their "nationality" (i.e., ethnicity) and/or religion. Large numbers of Americans whose parents or grandparents were immigrants from Europe continue to identify themselves as "Polish" or "Italian," etc. Even Irish-Americans whose foreign roots are often with their 19th century grandparents and great-grandparents usually call themselves "Irish." Although this dual identity is most common among working class Catholics, in some areas of the Midwest it is found among people of north European Protestant origins. In the post-WW II era Jews have finally made it in American public life, and while many of the characteristics of East European Jewish culture are rapidly fading, Jews maintain a very strong sense of a unique identity. The battle for racial equality has begun in earnest - black civil rights protests and marches, a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, violent mobs of white segregationists are in the news, and would stay there for the remainder of the Fifties and through the Sixties.
Rock and Roll not only changes the sound of pop music, it is changing its color. No matter how many cover recordings by the likes of Pat Boone and Georgia Gibb are produced, rock and roll is still in large measure black territory for many of its young fans. But in 1957 American Bandstand with Dick Clark would go national on TV - it will feature a squeaky clean, overwhelmingly white group of on-camera teenagers, and while initially featuring many black performers it will rapidly become a major promotional vehicle for white teen idol pop music. In the same year, Allan Freed's one-week old ABC-TV Big Beat dance show will be cancelled when black teenage singer Frankie Lyman dances with a white girl on camera (and this is in New York City, not Alabama.)
Despite the post-war deluge of war memoirs and a never-ending series of books by Winston Churchill, as well as sentimental popular fiction, novels with probing themes sell well too - Catcher in the Rye, Too Late the Phalarope, The Caine Mutiny, The Adventures of Augie March, Man with the Golden Arm, The Invisible Man.
Gay life is furtive, almost all gay people try to pass as straight. Too much visibility even in private life, as at the Artists and Models Ball in NYC, brings down the police and gets your photo in the newspaper with a consequent loss of employment. And that's in New York City!
In the decades ahead American society would be transformed by upheavals over sexual mores and racial integration, and wild swings in politics and government as extremists, first of the Left and then of the Right, would attempt to determine the direction of U.S. society. What was at this point a shadowy homosexual subculture in New York City would push out of the underground in the mid-Sixties as the Gay Life - public and electric. Even as it would find its own way it would be seen as a confluence of these other radical currents. Eventually, for many people - both gay and straight - the place of gay people in American life would be viewed as the ultimate battleground over social control of the individual and minority groups and the final struggle over "traditional" values derived from those of the Victorian and Edwardian era middle classes.
Nevertheless, for most gay people most of the time and in the decades to come, gay life will still be a life, not a cause or an organization, a not always significant difference.
However, it is only the fall of 1956, and I am just going to college.
CONTENT-RELATED LINKS - checked 13 March 2007
(Each section of the site has its own links)
- The Asiatics - late 1940's gay life in NYC - McCarthy's life and careerGENERAL INTEREST LINKS - checked 13 March 2007
Recordings available from Amazon.com and other sources:
- article on famous jazz collection the theme of angst
