Interesting, if true. The 1940 version (10th edition) reads, on page 23,
MORAL TURPITUDE
Occasionally a person of immoral habits succeeds in joining the naval service. It is your duty to report immediately any suspicion or rumor of lewd, lascivious, and scandalous conduct. You would not hesitate to report a thief, so do not fail to notify the officers of the drill department if you have any suspicion that there is a person of immoral habits in your company. You would not want these men as your associates, so you must help the officers get them out of the service.
There is a strict ban on gambling on the previous page, too.
In the Fellini movie Amarcord set in the 1930’s there’s a scene with 4 teenage boys sitting in an old car inside a garage and they’re calling out the names of local women and jerking off together. The car is bouncing around like crazy.
From what I remember, there is some question on whether Kinsey’s studies were a representative sample due to social mores and the self-reporting nature. There’s the idea that those who would answer his questions already tended to be more open about sex, which tended to be those who were more open to different ideas.
That’s not to say his studies aren’t valuable, but that it’s possible his percentages aren’t accurate.
It makes sense that I would have heard those stories on this board, and from someone that, like BigT points out, is more open about sharing their sexual experiences and is more open about having sexual experiences.
“Male on male” sex is attested throughout history. Societal acceptance varied and so did the acts that were accepted. When society disapproved, the men and the acts went into hiding and sought ways of continuing without being caught.
Historical platitudes aside, the idea that “in the 1950s male/male sex was just regarded as something horney guys did when they couldn’t get dates” is just plain looney tunes. The country was deep into a puritanical phase. Homosexuals were hated, hunted, and shunned. “Normal” men could not be seen doing anything - anything, a gesture, an outfit, a manner of speech - that even hinted of homosexuality. That men generally would casually enter into such relationships just on a whim is contrary to everything we know about the 1950s. When it happened - everything happens - it would need to be a deep secret because it could at any point be used against you, not something that guys did on a Saturday night.
It’s hard to convey today how repulsive such acts were considered back then. Homosexuality was almost literally unspeakable, except to damn people with its taint. Imagine today’s Christian right attitudes spread throughout society and double them. That’s what casual homosexual horniness would be up against in the 1950s.
To add to all that, you could get arrested if you got caught. And the police were not above running sting operations at bars where homosexuals were rumored to congregate.
And, as this link reminded me, homosexuality was considered a mental illness. This article is a really good synopsis of the attitudes of that time.
I remember an early TV interview with Joseph Wambaugh, and he was talking about entrapment of gay men when he was in the LAPD. He treated it like a big joke.
With media and history mostly focused on the male side, I’m curious how the female side coped socially. In pairs or very small groups mostly in bedrooms? At summer camps?
As little kids in the sixties we played a game called smear the queer where one person was called out as being “queer” and handed a ball, he then would have to run and fight off the other kids as long as he could. It was a mind set that was ingrained into kids at an early age. To be homosexual was to be a cast out and it was OK to treat them as less than a person.
I had a friend that killed himself when he was 19 because he was outed as being gay. So sad, he was a good kid.
Circle jerks, along with being forced to have sex with a goat or other farm animal, sounds like urban legends we used to tell pledges in my fraternity days.
“You know how I know you guys are gay? Because you’re all sitting in a circle jerking each other off.”
“That’s gay?!”
I wasn’t around in the 50s, but my sense is that they weren’t particularly open about that sort of stuff.
I was a teenage boy in the 50’s, living in So Cal. We knew that there were homosexual males, but no one we had in our circle of acquaintances. We did not masterbate in public or privately with friends (of course that didn’t apply to what we did in our own personal time and space), and yes, male on male sex was not something that normal guys did when they couldn’t get dates.
Of course, there were probably just as many closeted homosexuals as the stats would indicate.
Yeah, and Alfred Kinsey also wrote that 4-month-old babies could be stimulated to orgasm.
Don’t think so, you pervert.
I had a friend in HS whose dad was a WWII Navy veteran; he died even before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” but he said there were gay men in his platoon, and everyone knew who they were and nobody cared as long as they minded their own business and did their jobs. Someone to whom I told this story replied, “Oh, yeah, everyone thought they were gay because they were skinny and had high pitched voices” and I told him, “No, he said it was because they were going out with each other.”
And when my dad was a college student in the 1950s, there were rumors of a gay bar (yes, it was called that back then) near campus, and he and a couple of his friends decided to check it out, out of curiosity (yes, really). The bartender walked over to them and said, “You guys don’t belong here. Leave” so they did.
BTW, my mother had a childhood friend who lived with her “best friend” for more than 50 years, and in the 1970s, when they found out they could do this, they bought a house together. Um, hello!
In books, movies and tall tales, perhaps, but not so much in real life. In my 64 years of existence I have yet to hear a first hand account of such an event which leads me to believe that it is about as common as cow tipping.
