Heterosexism in the US in the 1950s

When I was young (and impressionable, which goes without saying)—that is, in the 1950s, my teen years—all the models of love and romance that were held up to a young male in American society were of heterosexual couples. Everywhere one looked, the portrayals were of only heterosexual couples. This was true of songs, movies, musical shows--and books, with the exception of a very few books that still had, basically, "underground" status and which therefore very, very few people had access to or even awareness of. I remember when, here in Chicago, even in this big city, library books with a gay theme were kept not on display but locked away, so that you had to request them from a librarian. Kind of like the embarrassing situation that my fellow teen-age guys had to confront when they wanted to buy condoms, as these also were kept hidden and locked away in the drugstore.

Not only were all the models of romance in movies, etc., of a man and a woman. If you saw a ballet or anything else where there was dancing, it was always a man and a woman who were dancing together--even though that man dancing might actually have been gay and, by summoning up all the acting skills he could muster, had to feign romantic or sexual interest in his partner.

My examples will be from a few songs circa the 1950s. First the song, "There is Nothing Like a Dame," from the Broadway musical show South Pacific—which premiered on Broadway in 1949 and was later made into a movie. Here is a much-abbreviated version of the lyrics to that song (the setting is sailors, etc., on some Pacific island during World War II):

We got sunlight on the sand,
We got moonlight on the sea,
We got mangoes and bananas
You can pick right off the tree,
We got volleyball and ping-pong
And a lot of dandy games!
What ain't we got?
We ain't got dames!

…………

We get letters doused with perfume
We get dizzy from the smell!
What don't we get?
You know darn well!

We have nothin' to put on a clean white suit for
What we need is what there ain't no substitute for...

Any suggestion that of one of the uses (or needs, I should say) for a "dame" is sex is only very subtle here. Such was the morality of the time.

To continue quoting the lyrics of this song:

There is nothin' like a dame,
Nothin' in the world,
There is nothin' you can name
That is anythin' like a dame!

…………..

There ain't a thing that's wrong with any man here
That can't be cured by pullin' him near
A girly, womanly, female, feminine dame!

I get particularly offended by that last part, with its generalization about "any man" who inevitably needs a woman. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever, in this song, of the fact that there might just be some men in the service (and there definitely were!) who had no interest at all in "dames." (Nowadays I imagine a lot of women would object to the use of the term "dames.") Not to mention that, among the chorus boys dressed as sailors who were singing this song, there doubtless was a significant contingent of gay men, who again had to impersonate heterosexuals.

And all libidinous attraction was assumed to be to the opposite gender. Here is a bit of the '50s song, "The Petticoats of Portugal":

There's not a guy alive
Who doesn't thrive
On watching skirts blow free,
Especially the petticoats of Portugal.

Never mind that it would do nothing for this guy nor for hundreds of thousands of people like me: we simply didn't exist, at that time.

Then there was the popular song, "Love and Marriage" (later the theme song of the TV sitcom Married with Children):

Love and marriage,
Love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
Dad was told by Mother,
You can't have one without the other.

The message would seem to be that, even for heterosexual couples, if you love one another, ya gotta get married. That should seem silly and maybe even offensive even to straight people! And there's no provision for the possibility that the object of your affection could be someone of the same gender. In the 1950s no one could even conceive of two people of the same sex getting married; and even in 2011, same-sex marriage is still impossible in more than three-quarters of the states of the United States.

So it was easy for me back then, growing up in a smallish town, to believe that I was the only one on Earth who was experiencing an interest in the bodies of other boys.

Since this was a metropolitan area of at least a few hundred thousand people, there probably was at least one gay bar somewhere in the area. But I would not have known about it, and I was too young to visit bars, anyway.

It wasn't until I was in college and studied fields like Sociology that I learned that such a thing as gay bars existed—in big cities. So then I—again like a lot of others—thought not merely that gay people congregated in the larger cities but that they existed only in those large cities.

So the point here is the painfulness of growing up with minority status, made even worse without the benefit of knowing even that others do exist. Accurate representations of any minority sexual interest did not exist because it was a taboo topic.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein