I think LGBT people knew. But yes, mainstream America did not. There was plausible deniability. If you “knew,” and said anything, then you would also be suspect. No one who knew would have any positive incentive to say anything.
True but he lived a suspect life style. Some close associates, like Cohn, died of Aids. If the need arose, that’s the way I’d bet.
The OP’s quote is absurd. Homosexuals were forced to remain closeted under threat of criminal penalty (it wasn’t until 2003, in Lawrence v Texas, that a law criminalizing sodomy was ruled unconstitutional).
Another anecdote: I like to watch old NFL football games on YouTube. If you put in a team and year (say, 1984 Miami Dolphins) you can often find full feature length games, commercials included.
I was watching a ‘79 Bucs game (with early John Madden!) and it cut to a car commercial. People were at a drive-in, and kept getting in the wrong cars (I think the premise was that the car being advertised was being mistaken for much pricier brands). The joke was that women were getting in the cars of men who were not their dates, until at the end you see a guy get in another guy’s car and hear the punchline: “what are you, some kind of weirdo?”
Even for me, a kid who graduated high school in 1996, the vernacular was that “that’s so gay” meant “that’s so lame”. There was a kid in my grade who everybody assumed was gay, but he didn’t come out (per Facebook) until he had moved away. Another kid was also closeted, but not under suspicion.
And I still recall the sociology prompt I got my sophomore year of college: “Should society be more accepting of homosexuality?” This was 1998. That same year the whispers in the dorm was that the quiet kid who lived alone would spy on you in the shower through a peephole (there was no peephole).
The idea that there was some form of casual homosexuality in the 1950’s is shocking in its contrast to that actual history. Lots of actors who we now know to be gay - the aforementioned Liberace, for example - were never even conceived to be such, because the 1950’s perception of gay was equivalent to child molester.
A lot of this discussion, while keeping it within the perimeter of the 1950s USA, neglects social class and geographic distinctions.
The middle class: a relatively recent invention and always fragile. It’s rituals and rules were strictly enforced, and they definitely included who you could have sex with and under what circumstances.
Upper classes: weather due to enlightenment or indulgence, much more leeway. If you give Gore Vidal and William S. Burroughs credibility (not asking for carte blanche) it was acceptable along with the dictum “as long as they don’t do it in the street and scare the horses.”
Lower classes and minorities were allowed their few pleasures as they found them, although it was not ok to bottom. Otherwise, as Hemingway relates a saying he heard from Great Lakes mariners “oh gash is fine, but one-eye for mine.”
Bohemian class outliers of course accepted it across history. Somewhere there’s film of Allen Ginsberg listing a lay-line of guys he’d been with connecting him with guys Walt Whitman’s lovers.
Geography, middle America was could incubate gays but they wouldn’t nest there. Big cities like New York, where Alistair Crowley had cruised the baths at the turn of the century, or San Francisco where WWII servicemen stayed after being discharged for homosexuality rather than go back home.
Los Angeles was a study in contrast: the movies attracting gays, the whole “reinventing oneself” appeal of California, but with Hollywood surrounded by the other dream of California as a place cleansed of Blacks and degenerates and socialists. Where West Hollywood became a gay Mecca at the same time a few miles away Inglewood created this public service video to protect their kids’ endangered buttholes.
Explain the Stonewall Riots then, you know, the one at that upper-middle-class bastion of free expression in the openly wicked big city.
Someone forgot to pay off the cops
Sure, and that’s why the notoriously gay-hating LAPD was so nice to the boys in West Hollywood.
This thread, starting with the very first post, has been looking at the attitudes of the heterosexual community toward homosexuals. Not whether homosexuals existed - of course they did. Not whether they had gathering places and friendly neighborhoods - of course they did. Not whether they devised dozens of ways to meet one another - of course they did.
The topic is whether heterosexual men casually engaged in “male-on-male” sex of an evening rather than, I don’t know, go bowling, with exactly that much consideration. That’s ludicrous. It was in the 1950s and I’m pretty sure it still is today. And also a million miles away from anything your post touches.
BTW @Crane, you ignored me before, but here it is again. If anything you say is accurate, explain the Stonewall Riots.
I noticed on the Stonewall Riots wiki page (or somewhere related) that the original DSM, published in 1952, included homosexuality as a sociopathic disorder. Before that, from what I can tell, it was considered a form of sexual psycopathy. This seems to be in direct contradiction to Crane’s recollection that male/male sex was seen as some kind of substitute for male/female sex.
Also, I found a cite that hits the nail on the head. It’s from a 2004 L.A. Times article about Alfred Kinsley,
In the 1940s and 1950s, homosexuality was deemed highly deviant behavior for which a person could be imprisoned, institutionalized and subject to forced “cures.”
@BigT, the article also has something to say about the accuracy of Kinsley’s numbers. Where he had reported that 10% of males had exclusively or extensively homosexual experiences,
Today, experts believe that Kinsey’s precise numbers were inflated, partly because the people he interviewed to draw his conclusions – especially in the book on males – were not nationally representative. A posthumous reanalysis of his massive dataset found that when interviews from prisoners and other sources likely to over-sample the number of homosexual participants were removed, the percentage of those with exclusively homosexual experiences fell to 3%; another 3% reporting that such experiences were extensive but not exclusive. Those figures are in line with more recent studies.
Also, It was mentioned by Professor Moriarty upthread that sodomy was illegal in some states until as recently as 2003. But something I was not aware of until reading more about it, prompted by this topic, is that sodomy laws often criminalized not only anal but also oral sex. I also read that Illinois was the first state to decriminalize sodomy, but that was in 1962.
Crane, I’m not sure how you can maintain your position given all of this, and the personal anecdotes.
~Max
The film was based on the book “The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies” by Vito Russo, who was a friend of mine.
I never said it wasn’t illegal or considered immoral. My comment referred to the attitude of the young male population of the Bay Area in 1950.
Then your comment was incredibly poorly worded.
You didn’t say “1950”; you said “the 1950s”. And you didn’t limit your notion to a region or a subset of the entire population; you were generalizing about the social mores of the time.
Even if we narrow this down to “the young male population of the Bay Area in 1950”, I have serious doubts. But this seems like a “no true Scotsman”
debate - if I point out that there was serious opprobrium against gay conduct in 1950 S.F., I imagine that I’ll be told that I’m referring to people who were not a part of that “young male population”.
Was it possible that there was a group of young gay men who engaged in casual sex amongst themselves, even in 1950? Yes, sure. But did society just shrug and go “that’s just them boys who can’t get dates. No big deal”? That’s absurd.
Perhaps so.
But, I don’t understand the significance that’s being assigned to it. Some males engaged in MM sex as a substitute for for MF sex.
It implies that sexual orientation is a conscious choice.
~Max
For some people it is.
I see that my premise is a universal positive and therefore invalid. It should be altered to read:
It is my recollection that in the 1950s some male/male sex was just regarded as a thing horney guys did when they couldn’t get dates. It wasn’t condoned but It did not imply that they were exclusive or different.
It’s not like there weren’t gay people in the 1950’s…there were just a very small minority of them that were out. Many gay men married and had families because of social pressures. But many of them also found each other through various means to satisfy their sexual needs. And if they happened to get caught, then they were “just something horny guys did…” in their explanation to their wives or family.
And there it is…
Can you provide any documentation at all to support this premise?
Wasn’t it the Hite Report that discussed circle jerking among heterosexual adolescents as something that isn’t too uncommon? As a kid in the 80’s, reading everything about sex available in the local library, I was struck by this. Kinda wished it would’ve happened to me IRL, the super-horny teenager that I was.
Are you referring to personal recollections? If so, that would make you about 90, right?
While it may have been the view among some small subset of the U.S. population, the prevailing attitude in the 1950’s was that gay behavior was a sign of mental illness, and if you engaged in that type of thing you were likely to molest children.
I’d be shocked if there was some of recreational gayness that was even remotely acceptable, except amongst the participants.