Anthropologists recognize that what societies say is different from what societies do.
OK, so in 1971 a book was published called: Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask).
It was in our household when I was a teenager and I read it cover-to-cover. Apparently, this was the go-to book for clueless (or curious) adults in the 1970’s. Frankly, I don’t know where the guy got his information. In light of what we now know, it seems dated, quaint, full of errors, and has a very strong aroma of urban legend and supposition. Yet in spite of its flaws, it was a popular source of information about sex for people who might not otherwise get candid and nonjudgmental information.
The point that I’m driving at is that I think a lot of urban legends or mythologized anecdotes come from this book, or books like it. And one of those stories is the story of the circle jerk. I’ve never heard or read such a thing reported by an actual participant, but it seems like people of boomer age often had a campfire story about a friend-of-a-friend who told them about it. So I feel like circle jerks probably happened, but the anecdote is more widespread than the reality.
So, um… circling… back to the OP, I don’t think male-male sex was seen as a normal desperation outlet in the 50’s (notwithstanding jokes about prison or the Navy). Comparing bodies, experimenting, etc happened during adolescence to varying degrees. It was (mostly) regarded as a “boys will be boys” activity. It wasn’t much stigmatized, but there was a strong expectation that it wouldn’t persist into adulthood. I don’t dispute that circle jerks probably occurred, but the bulk of stories were probably apocrypal.
Might be different, and so far we have nothing but your unique perspective that it was when it comes to how homosexuality was perceived in the 50’s.
Any man who reads the first chapter – about behavior in men’s rooms – knows that the book has no relation to reality.
To illustrate the point - do you believe American Catholics do not use birth control?
To illustrate my point, the operative word here is “might”. It is easy to provide evidence that American Catholics use some sort of birth control. but so far all you have provided as to the how masturbation was perceived back in the 50’s is your unsubstantiated (to date) recollections.
You know, the 50s may be so far into the rejection of homosexuality that it was literally unthinkable. And when things become unthinkable, people don’t have the same objections that they have when something is thinkable-but-wrong.
I have a gay friend who spent some time in Bulgaria as a young adult. Where, I gather, gay male sex was unthinkable. He told me had sex with guys who asserted that there was no such thing as gay sex, or that no one did it, or some such bizarre comment. He told me that he said, “but we just HAD SEX” and the guy pretty much ignored what he said.
Now, I’m pretty sure my friend is a bottom, and the guys he had sex with didn’t think the topping they did was “homosexual”. (And in a lot of places, the distinction society draws between “straight” and “not-straight” for men is between whether a guy consents/seeks out being a bottom, not who or what he has sex with as a top.) But still, it was just unthinkable.
Another example of “unthinkable” that I’ve heard of is a friend who is polyamorous, and lives with two women. They were buying a new mattress, and all of them wanted to try out the mattress and see if they liked it. They said as much to the salesman, who simply didn’t hear them, and kept assuming the women were sisters or some other weird construct. (The woman look nothing like each other.)
So I wouldn’t be shocked that Crane’s experience is true, and that it could happen precisely BECAUSE homosexuality was so totally unthinkable.
Pulp fiction has several meanings these days. The popular one centers on fiction in pulp magazines, which started around the turn of the 20th century and died off in the mid-1950s. More modern theorists and collectors have started using it as in the Gay Pulp Fiction wiki page I cited above, as fiction that was published in paperback that superseded the pulp magazines. Wiki also has a page on Lesbian Pulp Fiction.
The short history is that mainstream publishers started accepted serious fiction on gay protagonists in the 1940s, especially after WWII. Paperback publishers made the covers more lurid and added startling tag lines, the newsstand version of clickbait. They also did that to classic literature and the most sexless whodunnits. Some firms went much farther than others. Some lines, especially those owned by Beacon, created “sleaze” imprints. Today we’d consider them so softcore as to be unreadable, but many touched on more taboo issues than premarital sex and infidelity.
All of these got rediscovered in the 21st century. People have searched out every title that has a homosexual theme. The local Out Alliance has a library of non-mainstream books and magazines that includes them. You could put every one published before the 1970s into a small paper bag. Admittedly, the older titles are much rarer and harder to collect which is why the library doesn’t have a good sampling.
Male homosexuality didn’t sell well at all. Female-homosexually-themed books sold better if it catered toward heterosexual males. To please men and please censors, who were usually men, the women had to be punished or go straight by the end of the book. Happy endings were rare exceptions. Besides, men wrote more than 90% of the titles. From 1949-1965 only about 15 lesbians wrote a total of 100 lesbian-themed paperbacks.
A few of the literary reprints from top publishers sold in huge numbers. The Price of Salt was published by giant Bantam Books and was a pseudonym of Patricia Highsmith, so they had a motive to push the book even though she wouldn’t allow her real name to be used on it until 1991. Bantams were recognized by newspapers, who printed their press releases as news about forthcoming books. The Montgomery Herald did one on Sept. 27, 1953, describing the book as “A novel of forbidden love, touching a subject customarily taboo, presented without too much offense to good taste.” The topic was still unspeakable. The rest were hard to find because they weren’t as widely available; many outlets preferred standard mysteries and romances to taking chances with sleaze.
A good article is Lesbian Pulp on the Unsuitable blog, dealing with the major successes and also the many restrictions on lesbian novels in that era.
Interesting perspective.
My Bulgarian business partner (many years ago) was a student in Germany during WW2. He once commented that “all men were screwing each other in Germany and Bulgaria”.
I have more than a small paper bag’s worth, myself. Not necessarily in their original pulp form, of course. And many more that are more properly described as pop fiction from the 70s and 80s.
I’m pretty familiar with the genre.
Didn’t Highsmith also deny she was a lesbian, or am I misremembering?
I was talking about the Out Alliance library, not every one ever published!
And it’s a historic archive. Only the originals are allowed in. Some irony there, I’m sure.
Does anyone remember True Confessions magazine and similar?
My Junior high school friends and I loved these, and they were surprisingly graphic for the era, especially considering that they were sold on the comic book rack at the local drugstore.
One story I remember was about a young woman who went “parking” with her boyfriend and was pulled from the car by a gang of hoodlums who held her prisoner for several days, doing unspeakable things to her. The last line of the story was “I’ve learned my lesson, I’ll never go parking again.
The young woman being seduced by an older lesbian who does unspeakable things to her and brings her friends over to do more unspeakable things to her was the story line of at least one of these tales …….they did a pretty good job of speaking of the unspeakable things, I think that story was my first encounter with the word “dildo”.
But each story had its little moralizing ending, and they were mostly about things that probably never really happened to anyone.
Highsmith’s sexuality wouldn’t be believed if it were a novel.
According to her Wiki page,
She was considered by some as “a lesbian with a misogynist streak.”[[30]]
Apparently, she was sexually attracted to women, but socially she liked men better than women. And she liked cats better than humans of any gender.
We’ll it has been said that being bi doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night. 
In my experience, a GREAT amount of sex occurred in man’s rooms, at least in the '60s and '70s. Especially on college campuses.
I once encountered a guy who was having every conceivable type of sex with different guys, as a bottom. But he refused to kiss anyone, because “that would make [him] gay.”
I went to college in the early 80s. And my college boyfriend (now my husband) commented that he thought there were an awful lot of guys who were constipated in the stalls in the men’s room in the science center, all the time, until he realized what was actually going on.
A great post, puzzlegal!