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Every time I hear about poodle hoop skirts and buckles crossing buns and the fin-filled streets of the '50s, I cringe. When they trot out the trivia about the price of doggies in windows and the bunny hop and detachable angora collars with pompoms dangling from strings on sweater sets and D.A.'s and pony tails, I want to be sick. I was there. I was there gay.
Sex for me in the '50s was hoping to catch a glimpse of my high school hero's naked body in the gym locker room and being terrified that it would result in a hard-on and a punch in the mouth. It was doing it alone, without even knowing the name for those men who filled my fantasies while I tried to be straight like the other guys, pretending not to mind the two-ton tank they put opposite me in the football lineup (course required by the school), pretending to enjoy obligatory attempts to feel up my dates, pretending not to enjoy poetry or serious music.
It was dancing to rock'n'roll as an academic exercise instead of an erotic expression, because I was dancing with a girl I had been taught to cheat, and not with a boy where I belonged. It meant preferring the company of women to men when I had to be with the adults, because they were less
... dancing to rock'n'roll as an academic exercise instead of an erotic expression, because I was dancing with a girl I had been taught to cheat, and not with a boy where I belonged."
likely to demand the latest baseball scores and more likely to be compassionate, at least in front of me. It was feeling uncomfortable in men's places, like the gym where I took boxing lessons (course required by my mother) and barber shops; or the synagogue, with Hebrew I didn't know, afraid I would be called upon to read, to perform what I didn't know how to do, pray in someone else's language.
Being gay in the '50s was being the only one. It was knowing there was something different about me -maybe something wrong with me-and not knowing what it was, because no one ever talked about that subject, since even talking about it could mean you were it, and nobody wanted to actually be it. As long as they didn't know I was "it," they could laugh about it in front of me, pulling their pinkies exaggeratedly across their eyebrows to indicate effeminacy, snickering in whispers about "fags" and "queers" and "fruits" and "pansies" until I finally learned the words for what I am.
Living in the '50s was having no one to tell. Not my father, not my mother, not my brother, not my
closest friend. (We confessed to each other years later; he was "it" too!) It meant having no one to ask, no teacher to educate me, nothing except books, precariously purchased and carefully hidden, and discussing the subject with clinical inaccuracy from someone else's point of view, or tragically in fiction that plunged its characters to inevitable suicide.
Living in the '50s was reading of raids on bars that catered to undesirables in the newspaper that printed only the news that was "fit to print." It was learning that "The Correct Thing" was to walk around the back of the car having deposited your date in the front
no
one ever talked about that subject, since even talking about it could mean you were it, and nobody wanted to actually be it."
seat and closed the door as if she were some sort of helpless mannequin instead of a competent human being.
Being gay in the '50s meant being secretly in love with James Dean, and loving his tender concern for Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause and sorrowing in a special way when he died, and still not being able to ask whether that tenderness could happen offscreen without offending the America who loved him. It was going to see Tea and Sympathy, which dealt with a delicate subject it never mentioned; the only problem its hero had was that he liked to sew buttons on shirts and wear his hair too long-longer than a crew cut. But we all knew what that meant! (pinky across eyebrow and secret smirk.) In the end, a trip to the bushes with a woman cured him of his compulsive desire to sew in public.
Being gay in the '50s was the pits. Being a gay teacher in the '60s had its own problems; for me the '50s spirit lasted until 1970.
being secretly in love with James Dean ... and sorrowing in a special way when he died....
For a good deal of America, the '50s aren't over yet. Things are far from perfect.
But for a lot of us they're better now. I'll take today's problems over yesterday's paranoia anytime. So whoever's pushing it, keep your shoo-be-doo-be-wha. Times are getting hard, and we have a long way to go, and in lean years people don't want to hear about your problems. If I'm at all nostalgic, it's not for the spirit of shoo-bedoo. It's for "We Shall Overcome." Our past.
Page 34
THE ADVOCATE
May 7, 1975